Opinions

 
Jurate Kutkus Burns

On my first visit to Lithuania in 1998 I was struck by 2 major differences between the language I heard spoken at home in the USA and that which was spoken in Lithuania.

My parents pronunciation was much softer, and did not have that hard Slavic edge I heard spoken by young Lithuanians. Also, there were lots of vocabulary words unfamiliar to me.
Jurate Kutkus Burns, Florida

 [Ref. our article: https://vilnews.com/?p=7150]

I really enjoyed reading this commentary. I feel I have had someone validated me and my personality, for not only do I smile a lot, I love to laugh. It is hard to be seen this way in a wave of gloomy faces, and I have sometimes thought it a sin to be too happy. I am of Lithuanian descent, and I do know of some to whom the concept of even a hint of a smile is considered not something appropriate in public. Maybe more conducive to something you do indoors. I don't think it really pertains to culture. Maybe just a matter of temperament, because there are gloomy people all over this planet of ours.

Ramute Juska

 "Enthusiasm is the least expensive and most beneficial cosmetic in the world." Have all a happy productive DAY..and keep smiling :-))

Ingrid Baronaite Hammoud

Dear Sir;

First of all, I’d like to say how much I enjoy VilNews.  Thank you for your effort.

I am a Lithuanian, although I have lived in the U.S.A. since the times when Lithuania was still in the depth of the Soviet occupation.

Just a little aside regarding smiling/ not smiling.

True, the Lithuanians are not in the habit of smiling easily to strangers, but I rather think it is more cultural than anything else.   I am writing this because of my own encounter with some other cultures, in this case, Mexican. When my husband and I were getting ready to visit Mexico for the first time, we read much about the country, its  history, culture, customs, etc.  I remember being surprised  at reading that it was not customary to smile in Mexico at strangers, in shops, restaurants, museums, etc. and it was suggested to try not to smile because the Mexicans find it strange and puzzling to see a total stranger smiling at them.  Somebody said that people who do not like kids are not all that bad. The Lithuanians who do not smile are, in general, just fun, outgoing, friendly people. You simply have to get to know them. Then, they are all smiles.

Cheers and a big smile!

Irena Cade
Amherst, MA
U.S.A.

Article ref:
https://vilnews.com/?p=6704

REGINA NARUSIENE: “The majority, I believe, are disappointed and discouraged with the present president’s seemingly unfriendly view toward Lithuanian-Americans and others abroad.”

* * *

The above article was published in VilNews 18 June. I added, by then, the following comment to the article:

And here is what US-Lithuanian Joe Barlow says in his today’s comment:

The majority of people I speak with have no interest in doing anything, because of the unwelcome feeling or worries of being taken advantage of and wondering if they will get any kind of return on investment or just watch it all go down the drain

I could not agree more with Aage, this is long overdue coming and there are enough people outside of Lithuania that have the means, Education, Business expertise, Etc... that would only help our country and everyone involved or connected to it.

Keeping all the diaspora at bay and not welcoming such people seems such a waste, when together all as a whole we can make things better, in all aspects; Economy, Banking, Education, Investments in companies the list goes on...

The majority of people I speak with have no interest in doing anything, because of the unwelcome feeling or worries of being taken advantage of and wondering if they will get any kind of return on investment or just watch it all go down the drain.

There is no bottom to this well of people from all different fields and many experts, but this well will dry up and soon another generation will pass and there will be more and more less interest in knowing our homeland and trying to keep it a strong vibrant economically sound country, one we can all be proud of and one many still are of.
Joe Barlow

The trick is, what to do about it or, for those of us living outside, why should we be concerned? As life goes on, roots are deepened overseas and Lithuania turns its back on us or makes no effort to either woo back the Diaspora, attract tourists or foreign investment (are these all culturally linked?) an "ace up Lithuania's sleeve" will be lost forever.

To be sure, internally generated progress over the last 20 years has been great and the cultural life, in Vilnius particularly, makes life here in Cleveland, or almost anywhere else I can afford to live, pretty dull.

Lithuania, however, given its precarious geographic position and small population needs to be exceptional in how it organizes itself and how it takes advantage of every scrap of resource (particularly human) that it can.

Rimas Aukstuolis,
Cleveland (American-Lithuanian)
Vice President Structured Trade Finance, Fifth Third Bank

Comments to the blog:
I will become a resident of Vilnius – again after 17 years abroad
By best-selling writer Andrius Užkalnis

Article ref: https://vilnews.com/?p=6913

Welcome, Andrius,
and I hope you'll find your luck in Vilnius, especially the place you'll live is miracolous. Don't forget to visit Uzhupis, to have beer with our republic's citizens:),
Yours, Thomas Chepaitis

Well, good luck. Hope you try to find some way of using what you have learnt abroad to help Lithuania get rid of its Soviet mentality. And hope you keep sharing your thoughts with Vilnews.
Gintautas Kaminskas

Good luck to you and your family! I wish you to soar smoothly and elegantly and make Lithuanians think and re-think and to look at the things from a different corner and with eyes widely open to the world not only their village called Lithuania.
Good girl

It seems to me that not only will you enjoy your native culture in the magnificent Vilniaus senamiestis, but you are bringing something valuable back home. You can add to the richness and diversity of a small, but great country which is well-loved by so many of us scattered across the globe.
Jurate Kutkus Burns

goodbye England's rose...
E_J

LOL :)))
Goodby English rose, hello Lithuanian thyme... or thorn... or...

Užkalnis forgot to mention, that he has some quite good friend here (Lithuania) also (I'm not talking about me, I mean I just think so, I mean I know that).
Skirtumas

welcome back :))
niex

A repatriate is an outsider too, a foreigner at home.
Nomeda Repšytė

 
Former president and prime minister of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas. who died last year

The idea is excellent, but the problem is that the majority of the people in the positions where the change could be initiated were from the Soviet times. The fact that Brazauskas was really good at public relations and was able to retain his power for so long meant that the same people who were used to the Soviet style of thinking and work ethic kept their jobs, even if they were doing nothing or even doing harm. To them, changing the way how things are done meant undermining their own position, so of course they did nothing.

My hope is that with time the things will clean up, and these changes will occur. It will take time, though.
Tautietis

Unfortunately, the “inconvenient truth” is that the Soviet communist nomenklatura has hijacked Lithuania’s development in the last almost two decades and, consequently, our country has largely horribly wasted a truly impressive and immense political and economic capital of global good will, so excruciatingly hard earned by the Victims of the January 13th, 1991 brutal Soviet aggression and by the blood and brains of the legendary Lithuanian freedom fighters, world renowned anti-communist dissident movements, and political refugees in the West in the post-WW II years.

Valdas Samonis, PhD, CPC (Canadian – Lithuanian)
The Web Professor of Global Management (SM)

Mervyn Bedford at one of the many Oxford landmarks of higher education.

How soon will human beings be wired to the super computers?

Because I know Aage Myhre and his wife and very much respect what he is trying to do for Lithuania, I offered to write of educational values for the new version of VilNews. The Baltic nations have a perfect opportunity to change the map of educational provision in ways that better fit the rapidly changing world of the 21st. century. Education is not about buildings. It is not about systems and organisations. It is not about tests and inspections. It is about people and the relationships between those who want to learn, or need to learn, and those who already know it. For almost 150 years State school systems have imposed a model of teaching and learning that has hardly changed while society has fundamentally changed and, recently, very rapidly. Those changes are racing unseen towards our youngest children.
At a conference in Norway in 2009, reported in the respected UK magazine “New Scientist,” experts discussed how soon human beings will need to be wired to the super computers rapidly arriving in the work place. Earliest suggested date was 2045. At MIT in the US by 2029 they will have computers able to replicate human thought and decision by copying the chemical and electrical patterns in the human brain. Two Oxford University teachers have argued in print about whether it is right to allow students drugs to enhance their brain performance. Drugs to provide specific hours of sleep and brain implants that help deaf children to hear and paralysed limbs to move already exist. Job requirements in a very few years time and the character of society will change dramatically. We do not have long to get a school system right. 

Read more…

Associate Professor Aurelijus Gutauskas, Mykolas Romeris University, Law Faculty,. Criminal Law and Criminology Department
Head of the Department

By Aurelijus Gutauskas

Human trafficking has taken a new form as some victims agree to travel to countries with higher standards of living and engage in voluntary prostitution. The women's social vulnerability (unemployment, absence of income) and absence of other information results in their allowing others to take half of their income. Human trafficking is organized and committed not only by Organized Criminal Groups (OCGs) but also, in some regions of Lithuania, by individuals with no direct connections with OCGs.

Human trafficking involves recruiting people (by deception or telling the truth), organizing transportation (by finding ways to forge documents and arrange transport), and searching for locations in which to sell and receive profit. Payment is sometimes extracted from the person's earnings.

Victims of human trafficking are usually women aged 18 to 24. They are recruited through modeling agencies, radio shows, online dating, social networks such as Facebook and other websites, and often voluntarily leave their home countries.

Cases are known in which women are offered legal jobs (as waitresses and dancers), but once transported abroad they are forced to provide sexual services. Violence is also often used to make them work and to intimidate others. Search and recruitment is conducted by low-level members of the OCGs. Women are not only recruited by procurers but also by working prostitutes who receive rewards of up to 600 euros for a new woman.

Poland is one of the main transit countries through which persons are carried, but persons were also carried through Latvia, Germany, and the Czech Republic (using land transport where there was no internal border control). The destination countries are states with higher standards of living, whose economies are more stable, and where there is a demand for cheap labor and sexual services (e.g., Germany).

Employment, dating, and modeling agencies, recreation centers, nightclubs, rented flats, and hotels are used to commit these criminal acts. The establishment of LBSs is often planned along with the criminal activity being organized. Companies are set up in the names of other, often antisocial, persons. LBSs are established not only in Lithuania but also in the countries in which criminal acts are committed.

Favorable conditions for these criminal acts are created by tolerant national legislation, scarce state control, and the demand for sexual services and cheap labor in the destination countries.

The commission of these criminal activities is conditioned by complicated economic situations and high levels of unemployment in Lithuania. The reason OCGs participate in these criminal acts may be that they offer low risk and high profits. The proceeds of this crime are invested in legal business, and so destabilize the economy of the state.

By Val Samonis

RE: Lithuania has been having a difficult time setting an investment climate.

Mrs. Narusiene is right. Who wants to invest in a smallish (and getting smaller) country largely run by the former communist nomenklatura in the last close to two decades since Independence. Despite its glorious history, LT still has a bad image problem globally, largely due to the 1992 return of former Bolsheviks to power. Younger generations see that older folks have been voting for communists, so now we have a historically highest emigration - young people "vote with their feet"! Who would want to invest in a country that does not believe in itself; who does not correct its mistakes swiftly?

Fresh winds of new confidence based on young people and new leaders are badly needed: a catch 22 situation.

* Catch 22:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22

Illustration: http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-love-Lithuania/124391247572076

Dear Aage

Your editorial of 6 June:
("How can Lithuania better attract and assist foreign investors?")
made depressing reading.

It also made me think of an analogy which helps me to understand why I and other don't give up and turn our backs on Lithuania. The analogy partly comes to mind because at the beginning of August I am visiting Lithuania with my son (age 35) who has never been to Lithuania yet. Anyway, the analogy is this: let's say you and your partner are parents who love their child very much, as is natural. Let's say that at a certain age, perhaps 10, for argument's sake, your child is kidnapped by a creep and undergoes all sorts of horrible experiences at which I won't even hint – a parent's nightmare. The creep keeps your child for 25 years. During that time you never know whether you will ever see your beloved child again and the worry is hard to live with. OK, finally after 25 years the creep who was jailing your son/daughter finally dies and your child is able to escape. Bewildered, he/she manages to get back to your house and say "Here I am, I'm still alive."

Now anyone can imagine what a horrible situation this is for the parents. Of course they never stopped loving their child and they are glad to have him/her back. But after 25 years, their child is automatically not the person they used to know and love, plus there are all the horrible experiences on top of that, and the damage done by 25 years of living with a creep.

I don't know how other feel about my analogy, but I personally find it useful to help understand our feelings. Our beloved country was kidnapped/hijacked by a bunch of creeps and held hostage for 50 years. They did horrible things to her. And the most horrible aspect of all is that the Soviet mentality lives on in so many Lithuanians and it is stopping Lithuania from becoming a normal country. Perhaps the sentence that upset me most in your editorial was: « "What's in it for me personally?" was the question that was often presented when we contacted representatives of local authorities and businesses.» It upsets me because it summarises the Soviet mentality that is continuing to do so much harm to my native land; and it upsets me because that mentality is still so widespread. It's why schools and hospitals continue to languish in their primitive state – because crooked politicians and businessmen can't make a "killing" out of them the way they do out of real estate development projects. Having a few skyscrapers and fancy shopping centres is no big deal. That's not a measure of civilisation. It's when the schools and hospitals come up to Western European standard – that's when we will be able to feel some progress has finally been made.

What keeps me from despairing is that unlike individual humans, fortunately countries are not mortal, they do not automatically die in less than a century. So Lithuania will go on, and my hope is that the forces of light (i.e. the West) will in the long term win over the forces of darkness (i.e. the East). Hopefully this process will be helped by Lithuanian immigrants (or their offspring) returning from Western countries, returning with Western attitudes, not prepared to tolerate the lingering Soviet way of doing things. Returning to my analogy, I guess the basic thing I want to say today is let's remember that our loved one is a torture and trauma survivor, and healing will be a long, slow process. It will require a lot of patience and understanding from us, and well thought-out forms of practical assistance.

Regards
Gintautas Kaminskas
Australia