Could It Be Our Fault That Our Dreams Are Paris and Our Lives Are Muş?

Could It Be Our Fault That Our Dreams Are Paris and Our Lives Are Muş?

I want to begin this piece with a friend’s story. The first days of 2011. An event called the Social Media Summit is being held at Sabancı University, and at the event leading names of the industry such as Mustafa İçil, Yüce Zerey, Alemşah Öztürk and Hasan Başusta were briefing participants on social media. In those days social media is still a very new phenomenon for our country. People have slowly started warming up to this magical world, but brands were still unsure how to behave. In America, things are very different. The wave created by social media has swept across the whole country, Obama has trounced his rival in the presidential election thanks to his social media policy, and brands were competing with one another to produce social-media-specific strategies. In our country, those who felt the aftershocks had already started grabbing seats up front.

These friends of mine, who were university students at the time, decide to found a social media club at their university as soon as they get back from the social media conference. Professors are consulted, files are prepared on why social media matters, and they go to meet the lecturer serving as student clubs coordinator. The articles they’ve written are presented, Obama’s success with his social media campaign is brought up, social media’s enormous future potential is explained, and an application is made to found Turkey’s first social media club. The student clubs coordinator reads the articles, leans back and listens to the students, and when they finish speaking he leans forward and says, ‘what you call social media is a sub-branch of marketing and it will never be as important as marketing. So, since there’s already a Marketing club, there’s no need to found a club like this!’ and sends the students (!) out of his presence. Two weeks later, news spreads around the university that a Red Crescent Club has been founded.

Throughout history, these lands have witnessed the ruin of young people forced to fight windmills.

We are all members of a society starved for success, consoled with honorable defeats. When two of our girls won gold and silver medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, which of us didn’t feel proud, didn’t tear up? When a child of this country dedicated the award he won to the lonely and beautiful country he passionately loves, which of us didn’t say, deep down, “Hats off to you, Nuri”? After the matches we won, wasn’t the chant ‘Europe, Europe, hear our voice, these are the footsteps of Turkey coming’ really the manifestation of how much pent-up resentment, how much being pushed aside and looked down on we carried?

It is an undeniable fact that, as a society, we make a set of systematic mistakes. We are all raised on hatred. Along with the alphabet, we learn that we have no friends but ourselves. Before we can even carry the bags on our backs, other burdens are piled onto our tiny shoulders. When Aunt Nebahat’s granddaughter Bilge is doing so well in school, our daughter doing worse than her is made into something unacceptable. The report card must be all A’s; what she learned doesn’t matter. As long as, on holidays, when friends and relatives ask “so, how’s the report card?”, Mom and Dad don’t have to blush.

Imagine there’s a running race at your school and your mother is getting you ready for it. I’m sure that even in your imagination, your mother is comparing you to her friends’ kids. Nobody in this country knows that the real rival is the child themselves, and that the greatest success is achieved only when a person competes with themselves. Today, which mother could answer the question John Lennon asked about Elvis Presley, whom he saw on the screen at the cinema he went to with his mother and was deeply moved by, mom, why am I not Elvis Presley, life isn’t fair at all, I want to be Elvis Presley too, with: maybe God is saving you to be John Lennon? Today’s winning children are being raised by mothers who send their sons, who ran away from a fight and came home, back out to the fight!

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

John Lennon

To sum up: those who hope to discover new worlds without working, by having an apple fall on their heads, should not forget that Newton was a professor at Cambridge when he discovered the law of gravity. Dikran Masis, known as the person who first brought many innovations such as the ATM and the money-counting machine to Turkey, said of America in an interview: ‘America is a country hungry for innovation. If someone in America says a cow is flying, people turn around to see whether it’s flying.’ Maybe all we need is to channel our hunger for success into the things it actually takes to succeed. To convince ourselves that the cow might be flying.

You can follow me on Twitter: @MarketingHolmes