I Dedicate This Article to My Lonely and Beautiful Country, Which I Love Passionately!

“Europe, Europe, hear our voice, these are the footsteps of Turkey!”

Whenever I listen to the speech Nuri Bilge Ceylan gave when he received his award at Cannes, I get emotional. Just as I did watching our two girls win gold and silver medals, finishing first and second at the European Olympics. The goal İlhan Mansız scored and the commentator’s hundreds of cries of “İlhan, İlhan” still echo in my head. I get emotional when I remember the goal Nihat Kahvecioğlu scored against the Czech Republic, and when I remember our volleyball team becoming world champions. Just as I feel sad when I hear the chant that strikes a blow to all these joys: “Europe, Europe, hear our voice, these are the footsteps of Turkey!”

We have to accept this: we are all children of a lonely and beautiful country that has been systematically held back and battered, especially over the last 100 years, and consoled with small successes. We are millions living as if something always went wrong at the last minute and all our happiness was snatched away just before we could taste it. We are children of a generation that pins its hopes on the secret clauses of Lausanne that we believe will be released when the treaty expires in 2023, on the treasures lying under the Bosphorus Bridge and on the oil fields that foreign powers won’t let us extract, a generation that blends with fatalism a lifestyle very far from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s words: “Nations that have made a habit of finding ways to live comfortably without working, without learning, without tiring themselves are doomed to lose first their dignity, then their freedom and then their future.”

The way to cure an illness or fix a bad situation starts with diagnosing it, however painful it may be to hear and accept. In this article I would have loved to tell you how self-confident, how successful the Turkish people are and what great things they have achieved, the successes we have won in the European Cup, the Nobel prizes this country’s children have received, how our brands have become world brands. Unfortunately, however, we can see that cronyism, vulgarity, favoritism and a “not my problem” mentality, spreading wave after wave from universities to shopkeepers, have seeped into the capillaries of society and caused damage that is hard to reverse. This state of affairs, which leads people to distrust not just other states but even their own people, divides society and means we only get to see the unity we long for in extraordinary circumstances.

Last month we went through one of the most chaotic events in the country’s history. We were faced with an organization so paranoid, so treacherous and so far gone that it would bomb its own state’s parliament and shoot its own citizens, its own brothers and sisters. The most important thing that gave me hope after this process was the messages of unity given as all differences of opinion were set aside. The August 7 Yenikapı rally was one of the most beautiful scenes I have seen for this country in a long time. I hope these messages of unity are backed by down-to-earth policies and that the children of this lonely and beautiful country achieve the success they deserve. If, as an individual, you are wondering where you should start, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s words will give you the answer you are looking for: “The strength you need exists in the noble blood in your veins.”

• This article was first published on Marketingholmes.com.

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