This week is a sad one.
Another young life has been lost, another dream has been cut short. Two families are in mourning, one woman has been left a widow, helpless, inconsolable, and two children will for a long time ask where their father is, until someone gathers the courage to explain to them that they will never see him again…
No matter how many of us there are here in Chicago, there are not so many of us that we can easily forget.
To pay 100, 200 dollars of aid on GoFundMe, settle our conscience and move on.
To simply pass over yet another coffin that will fly to Serbia, for the last time.
Because lately we have seen off many of them. We have mourned each one, and for each we hoped it would be the last. But it wasn’t.
Nothing has changed because we have not changed.
Because as people, each of us, and as a community, we have not understood where this senseless chase for money is leading, which we run on the hardest track, doing a job that is in itself so unfortunate it cannot be more unfortunate, risky beyond measure, tragic beyond measure.
And while the Chinese and Indians push their children to finish medicine, law, engineering, to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, we send ours on the road, often without return.
Anyone who has ever entered a truck cabin knows that every entry is a kind of farewell.
To a decent life, to a wife or girlfriend, to children, family, friends, regular sleep, meals, everything that is beautiful and important in life. Everything that is normal.
And it is not normal to live in a metal can without interruption for several weeks, to sleep a few hours a day, to eat from a can, without life insurance, to adjust your hours so you can drive longer and shorten your own life, to test the limits of the brain’s endurance, the body, the soul.
Is it all worth it in the end, when a mother cries?
Someone will say, and they will be right: The first generation of immigrants always has to sacrifice itself so that their children can live better. That rule is not from yesterday, it has applied for centuries.
But must the sacrifice be this great?
Our elders died in mines, left their bones in pits, died in steel mills and factories where they had metal for breakfast, smoke for lunch, and smog for dinner.
Must we, a hundred years later, in the time of robots and artificial intelligence, die on the road, lungs full of diesel, while firefighters pull us from burned machines?
Of course we do not have to.
The last message that morning, before his tragic death, sent by Aleksandar Conić, whom everyone in Chicago knew and loved as Žuća, says everything and sounds like an epitaph for the known and unknown heroes we have seen off in recent years and decades on a journey without return.
And in it Žuća tells his best friend, his roommate from student days in Serbia (hence he calls him Cimo), that he should quit trucking, leave his (Žuća’s) company where he works and finish medical school:
“Cimo, you are a man for whom it is a shame that he is not a doctor and that he is not engaged in medicine. You are not designed for a truck, just as I am not for a doctor. If you can, Cimo, feel free, because you can work until 70. And you can even open a private clinic…,” he says in the message, which today sounds like an epitaph, something that could stand on all the graves we have dug lately.
And then, alongside a picture showing him having breakfast of a can of sardines and jam from a jar, he sarcastically concludes: “Wonderful life”
Žuća understood everything, unfortunately too late to save his own life and take some other path, instead of the highway.
But it is not too late for thousands of young people who still set out on that same road every morning. Risking death, and lately even risking being arrested and deported without mercy.
It is not too late for them to change something, to outwit fate – which in fact is not and does not have to be fate! Just a poorly chosen job.
A job that, it is true, we all know brings the most money, and which serves us to pay all those lawyers, fake wives, these and those loans for apartments and cars, schools… But it is not the only job from which all that can be paid.
Even Dositej once said, “Books, Serbs, and not bells and rattles!”
Translated into today’s language, this could read:
“Study, children, and run away from those damn trucks, as fast as you can!”
Ask around a little, somewhere other than the tavern, where you drop by every other weekend to spend your hard-earned money, to get drunk with friends and for a moment forget what a miserable life you are living.
And when you talk to someone outside that vicious circle of tavern-truck, you will hear that with a completed university degree, in a few years, you can earn the same or more than in that hellish can, and live far better, without the risk that your picture will one day appear on GoFundMe.
Now imagine that sitting next to you are all those you knew, even superficially, as I knew Žuća, and who are no longer with you, not there to raise a toast, to hug you, to at least smile in passing…
My soul hurts as I write this, and I know that many of you hurt more than I do.
Maybe this is the moment to ask yourself. To turn off a road that leads nowhere, except into an abyss where money, houses, cars, even those damn passports and green cards are worth nothing. Because with them you have nowhere to go.
Another road exists. Think about it.
And find it, for the love of all those who love you, and whom you love.❤️
P.S. And I will ask you once again, all of you, to help the Conić family as much as you can, it will mean a lot to them. At the same time, thanks to the wonderful people, the organizers of the Saint Sava Ball held last night in the hall of the Church of St. George in Indiana, who responded to my call and decided to donate part of the money earned, as well as to all their guests who joined in.
P.S. On this occasion I also ask all our priests here, as well as all conscientious and responsible owners of trucking companies, in fact all of us older immigrants who still have any influence…to use every opportunity to talk to our children, to draw their attention, to advise them…so that we do not continue to mourn them.
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