Bulgaria: Why we don’t respect our elders

last updated 8 January 2015

Ruslan Jordanov

Standart

Bulgarians hate old people, said Ruslan Jordanov. I’m not kidding. In the latest Eurobarometer survey, 58 percent of us admitted to disliking the elderly, making them even more reviled than the Roma—quite a feat in Bulgaria. No wonder “nobody ever gets up to give them a seat on the tram.” Long ago, our society revered grandparents as fonts of wisdom. But today’s young people don’t want to take advice from the generation that endured communism. The old are “blamed for enabling the totalitarian system.” More to the point, they are “blamed for the shambles of post-communist reality known as the transition, in which their children and grandchildren struggle to live.” Their pensions are seen as “an onerous burden on the budget” to be paid to people who failed to generate wealth in their own time. That’s partly because there are fewer and fewer young people to pay taxes to fund these pensions—in the past decade, nearly 200,000 young people have moved abroad to chase after “material success and worldly comfort.” In a cohesive society, people would be glad to part with a small sum so that old people would not “be forced to dig through the garbage or fall into starvation.” Ours, though, is a “callous society.”