Turkey's odd sense of history

We try our best to undervalue our current achievements, while glorifying history with unrealistic hyperboles. Whenever we wish, we can easily overstate our economic development and democracy that we are able to maintain in a region, which is devoid of political fertility.

The question is whether our favorite party is in power or not. For many, today's main problematic is the 12-year rule of the AK Party led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Imagine that a young man in his 20s, who has achieved his own political consciousness, does not have a satisfactory answer to the question of which ruling party has performed better?

In the best-case scenario, he is likely to remember the appointed coalitions during the "postmodern coup" of Feb. 28, which pushed Turkey to the threshold of economic and political turmoil. After all, it is not possible for our society, which does not resort to written sources of information, to delve into the depth of politics and history through the means of visual memory.

Who remembers what?
Of course, most of the young population does not remember the long queues in front of the gas stations, crises of foreign currency, rebel zones and the incurable conflict between the rightist and leftists. Do we have no tendency to receive the year-old peaceful atmosphere that is the fruit of the reconciliation initiative and truce in the country's southeast, as if it is the usual case in Turkey for years?

What else can be said, if the spokesmen and architects of the cartel media of the "postmodern coup" are now clamoring for press freedom and, to my surprise, they find credibility in some sections of the society?

When you say that today Turkey is more different than it was in the past, it is not easy to explain this. All in all, it is not an easy task for minds that are stereotyped with ideological education to get off the black train, which was a blockbuster of the 1930s decade of bliss, and into today's high-speed train. For the rising generation, the achievements of the new Turkey are nothing but down-to-earth and ordinary phenomena of everyday life.

Everything goes down in history
A generation spent their lives discussing whether a bridge would be constructed on the Bosporus or our foreign currency would outflow if the television was introduced. The present generations, however, are the people of a time of welfare in which passing both under and above the Bosporus is taken for granted. They have the luxury of watching all television channels of the world through the Internet and enjoying computers that are minimized to fit into cell phones.