My association with the Ukrainian Diaspora broke down completely after a group of young people I knew traveled to Ukraine. We talked a lot before the trip and I helped them prepare, telling them what to expect and how to get around.
When my friends came back from Ukraine, though, it became clear we weren’t going to be friends any longer.
“Why on Earth did you tell us that the situation is bad in Ukraine and that the economy is very problematic?” they asked me. “We bought a lot of great stuff very cheaply. Unlike what you said, life in Ukraine is very cheap. And everybody was super nice to us and very much into Ukrainian culture. We taught several families how to celebrate the traditional Ukrainian holidays correctly.”
Obviously, the deluded and self-congratulatory obliviousness of the tourists who think a country’s economy rocks if they can condescend to people after waving around a wad of dollar bills did not seem attractive to me.
The price of any collective identification, I have found, is always an amputation of a part of one’s cerebral function. You can be very happy as a member of a group if you agree to stupidify yourself to an extent.
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