Messages from other worlds

Two Viber messages from the world of the dead, a public speech by a taxi driver and a remark from New Zealand about Kosovo and the world

1.

It is the first phone order that comes to me on the morning of departure for the airport, on the way from Pristina to New York.

The order says that Agron has returned to Viber. "Say hi!", orders Viber.

My mouth is watering after the initial shock. Agroni has been dead for two years, my first friend who died from COVID. We were friends from high school and he was known as a joker, with a sense for jokes and comical actions, sometimes or maybe always breaking the boundaries of what was acceptable for laughter until yesterday. My mouth was full of gas at the thought that even there, in that other world, he is exercising his barsolets and that with his big smile and the joke he is telling me that I deceived you when you escorted me to Dragodan, to the cemetery.

Yes, I know that what happened in practice is that someone from the family used Agron's phone and Viber was reactivated. But it sounds better to me that Agron is sending me messages from that world on this day of a special trip that Blerta and I are making, the way to the graduation ceremony of my daughter, Zoja, at the famous Harvard University, the one that takes the place second in the world.

also Arberi April 23, 2026 Zeneli: We are now in an abnormal democracy, in the "post-truth era"

2.

The taxi driver who takes us to Pristina airport, in his twenties, says that he has not been vaccinated, "because the one who invented the disease, invented the vaccine".

Because "I need to know what they are putting in my body" and he says this with our common knowledge that there are no basic qualifications to understand the initial lessons of chemistry and biology.

- Do you know that my friends have died from COVID? , I say. How can you talk like that?

- Yes, four from my family also went. They took them to the hospital and died there. Who goes to the hospital never comes back.

Words no longer matter. The natural follow-up question: "Where did you read this?" doesn't even come up, because the follow-up answer is just as natural, something like "on Facebook, de!"

Somewhere between the world Agroni is in and the one I am in is the world of the taxi driver. It scares me to think that the taxi driver's world is the one that the majority live in. What if it is?

3.

We are in Boston. Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, gave the keynote address at the matriculation ceremony for Our Lady and all other graduates. He says that two women have given birth to children while serving as prime minister. The first was Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, who was later assassinated. And the second was Ms Ardern herself. Her daughter was born on June 21, Benazir Bhutto's birthday, a coincidence that signaled one world to another.

But what is the world and moreover what is the real world? This is how J. Ardern's speech sounds to me. She is at the head of an exemplary democracy, which is represented in the Parliament with all the country's peculiarities. Twenty percent of the Assembly are Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, with whose language she begins her speech at Harvard and whose language she named her daughter. The Deputy Prime Minister of the country is from the LGBT community, more than half of the members of the Parliament are women.

And in this exemplary democracy in 2019, a single person in the city of Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques. The entire attack was broadcast by the killer directly on social media. The parliamentary commission formed after this attack concluded that the killer was radicalized through social media.

On social media, I freely use parts of Ardern's speech "ignoring the fact that the foundations of a strong democracy include trust in institutions, experts and government - and this trust can be built up over ten years, but crumbled in just a few years".

Social media and professional media are competing for the citizen's attention. In the first live "keyboard warriors" and in the second professionals who provide information with preparation and responsibility.

Ardern sees this war as extraordinary for liberal democracy; if the "keyboard warriors" win, the democratic essence of the free and responsible confrontation of opinions is lost.

Next to me listening to the speech is Flaka, Zoja's aunt and her biggest supporter to continue her way to Harvard. He is also the person at the head of the company "KOHA" who feels the great pressure of the professional media, especially in Kosovo. Ardern's words ring with special weight in her ears.

4.

In Boston, at the insistence of my friend Osman, I keep the phone with an American number. It belonged to his wife Zyrafeti. She died in 2018, but her phone remained in use; every time I'm in New York I see the selected family photo she loved on my phone screen.

Zoja came to live with Osmani and Zyrafetja during her graduation year. From the second they took care of him extremely. In the morning, he was escorted and in the afternoon the Lady was awaited by the generous smile and nobility of Zyrefete. She treated Our Lady with more care than her own daughters, and Our Lady felt her protection and warmth.

also Culture Supplement 24 Tues 2024 March 24, 1999: First NATO missile launch

While waiting for the Our Lady ceremony I tried to get the phone internet working which had been sitting unconfigured since 2018. With a little help I was able to finally connect it to the phone company's internet network. And, with this connection, Internet-dependent applications that had been dormant for four years were inadvertently activated.

The lady entered the line of recipients of the master's degree, on my phone from Kosovo and hundreds of other people, the Viber message appeared that Zyrafete O. is back - "Say hi!" - a confirmation that somehow, in the transition from one world to another the other one that is possible to have in this ceremony is a person whose love brought Our Lady here.