One of the biggest problems today is that people have abandoned reading literature that broadens their horizons. I’m not talking about Kivirähk’s “Kaka ja kevad” (“Poo and Spring”) or the ninth documentary book in the “Lord of the Rings”trilogy. Instead, people are glued to TikTok, their eyes wide with excitement, watching how some headscarf-wearing person treats their wife like a donkey and their donkey like a wife. And then their fingers are blistered from liking, declaring this to be the pinnacle of culture that humanity has yet to achieve! No wonder a jarred turd and a banana duct-taped to a wall have become today’s insurmountable masterpieces, making all previously created works of art pale in comparison. (I eagerly await the day when a bonfire is lit under the Eiffel Tower to burn Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” as an outdated doodle that obstructs modern top-tier art. In its place, they’ll put a sandwich in a bulletproof glass case, with a generous layer of literal excrement spread on it like pâté.)
In reality, though, it was a different topic that prompted me to put my thoughts into writing – namely, a fellow countryman asked me for my opinion on the car tax. At first, I didn’t reply because the topic led me to entirely different trains of thought, which I’ll try to introduce here.
Some time ago, I read an enlightening book about the formation of the mafia. It described a small piece of land where foreign powers repeatedly came and went, imposing new and ever-changing demands on the locals – Sicily. Under these conditions, the mafia emerged, covertly taking control of Sicily. Judges, police, officials, and so on were bought off, ensuring the mafia’s grip on power. Such operations, of course, require money. And money was shamelessly extracted from the relatively poor population using various means – protection money, extortion (rackets), etc.
In today’s Estonia, it seems that the group in power treated this book I mentioned as a primer and behavioral guide. All the mechanisms described in that book to ensure the mafia’s existence and operations are being used in Estonia today.
(Just received news that the Eiffel Tower is burning…)
In conclusion, I’ll express my opinion on taxes of all kinds – you grinning tax-imposers at least now know what I think of you and whom I compare you to. It’s as simple as that.
/Margo Luarvik/
