People change, the world changes, times change… Sometimes intentionally or unintentionally, and sometimes they really need to change even though we don’t want them to. Almost everything changes except that we are forced to evolve to keep up with the times and adapt to the world we live in. However, I do think there are some parts of every person that are never ever going to change no matter what happens or who they are. Actually, I do think the parts that are never going to change in a person like characteristics and all plus the experiences we have had in life make us the person who we are. As a proud Turkish youth, I think the principles of Atatürk(Republicanism, Populism, Nationalism, Secularism, Statism, Reformism) must be the default part of every person in this world who claims they are Turks. Unfortunately, I do not think that is the case.
As we are celebrating the 100th year of our republic and that is a huge deal, we still have to evaluate how well we have done in the past century. Although we might find some condolence for how well some people are doing I do not think we are going to like the final result of our evaluation. I mean you do not have to be a psychic to tell us we are not living in a country that truly acts on Atatürk’s principles or a country that is governed by the true principles of a republic. Even we – the youth – have lost our patriarchy. If you want proof you do not necessarily have to search for it. Just walk in the halls of our school for a couple of minutes, and you are going to be surrounded by people who hope to run away from the country whose freedom has been established by the blood of their ancestors. I am one of those people and I will forever live with the shame of leaving and not working for the country Atatürk left to us but even though I will live with shame I am going to have the chance to live a decent life because we are not living in the country that Atatürk founded therefore the chance of living a decent life here is very slim.
We will forever have our values and patriarchy in our hearts but we are not going to be able to live up to them and this is the ugly truth. We are going to celebrate the 100th year of our republic with big smiles on but deep down we all are going to know we have failed in the last century (it might be an overstatement but it is what it is).