I’ve always admired how film tells stories, it’s very relatable to the average man or woman. One such story is through a hotel after the Russian revolution. The show is called A Gentleman in Moscow. The protagonist(antagonist of the revolution) has to ‘teach’ one party official how an ‘elite’ acts in their mannerisms. Something he both resents and admires him for. For context, this is already after the end of the civil war between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks over ideological issues. The issue still persists. The elitist vs peasantry debate ends up even in the packaging of bread till the Berlin Wall’s collapse.
I’ve noticed a trend on my socials. Rural ‘Washambas’ and Urban ‘Chokoraas’ having regular cockfights on the comments section. The latter insinuating that primitive accumulation of wealth is purely influenced by ‘mushatharism’. Sometimes, it even goes away from bad governance to taste, music and architecture . It has sort of degenerated into a highschool popularity clique. Town folks looking down on shagz kids as unsophisticated, rough and even stupid/gullible. The shagz kids in return seeing them as spoilt, soft, delusional and shielded from reality.
It takes a lot of EQ to manage both of these camps. I firmly believe the Russian revolution would not have survived without Lenin. Between the gangsta peasant Josef Stalin and the elite holy cow Leon Trotsky, the Russian state would have evolved into a warlord state or a plutocracy ruled by champagne philosophers. Intellectuals and the leftist elite contributed a lot of theories and structures of the future state that even Stalin could not dismantle but capture. However, they could only conjecture what it was to be a peasant in the peripherals of vast Russia.
As GenZs have the conversations about to what and how their society should evolve, it’s richly rewarding to appreciate there’s a lot of wealth in our unique experiences. Brought together we can fix each other’s blind spots. UMOJA NI NGUVU, UTENGANO NI UDHAIFU.
