democracy, calf stomach and cheap wine

I always considered myself anti-capitalist. I hate the idea that we live in a society where seemingly the most important thing is our ability to make money. It makes me sick when I think that people measure each other’s worth by the car they drive, the clothes they wear, the computer they have or the size of their TV. Naturally, because I am so anti-capitalist I was drawn to “the other side”; I thought “hey, maybe communism isn’t really that bad.” A conversation I recently had shed some light on something I thought I wanted.
November 10th was the 16th anniversary of the fall of communism in Bulgaria. On that day a colleague asked me if I wanted to go to the local механа (Bulgarian tavern) for some wine and шкембе чорба (tripe soup). Never one to pass up wine and stomach soup, of course I said “да.” We dug into the soup and the cheap wine “Меча Кръв (Bear Blood)” and the conversation turned to the state of Bulgaria and how the kids in our school are absolutely crazy. I asked my colleague how things were like during communist times and whether he liked things better now or then (my reasoning was that one thing a dictatorship is supposed to be good at is maintaining order). He smiled and said “now. I like freedom.” He went on to say, with hand gestures mimicking a horse with blinders on, that when he was my age he only could do what the communists wanted him to do. (I like this man, but I am afraid he thinks I understand Bulgarian only accompanied with extravagant hand gestures…)
The difference between now and then is that even though things were more orderly during Communist times, it was only because everything was controlled by others. If he wanted to visit a family member in Петрич, a town located near the border with Greece, he had to ask permission from the Communist party and receive signed papers stating it was ok. My colleague studied economics in school. He wasn’t allowed to freely study Adam Smith, Keynes, or Ricardo; students in economics learned about them but only in the context that they were completely wrong. Not only travel and education, but even personal habits were controlled. As my colleague described it, if you had long hair, you went to jail! Bell-bottoms, jail! Beatles records, jail!
I was shocked by this. Of course, I had known that Soviet-style communism had strict controls on everything but to hear this from a man who had spent most his life without choosing what to study, how to wear his hair, even what he could listen to, made me very sad. But he also made me very proud. I asked him what was the first thing he did when freedom came to Bulgaria. He told me ran for mayor of his village and won. After 50 years of being told by a bureaucrat in Sofia who was in charge of his village, this man took advantage of democracy and became the village’s first freely elected mayor. Something so simple, in his voice, took on the proportions of being elected president of the United States. He also went back to school and relearned economics, this time learning what he wanted. He now runs the Junior Achievement Program in our school teaching young people how capitalism works in the real world.
I still am not in love with capitalism, but I have found a renewed appreciation of democracy. Sure it may be messy, and every once in a while we elect an idiot, and all too often the majority thinks they are the only ones that matter, still there is something to say for freedom. Freedom to listen to what we want, read what we want and go where we want. I felt very lucky to find appreciation in these little things. For once, the conversation was more interesting then the soup.