Props to Ukraine and Alyosha!

Hello. A quiet ESC fan here. I'm "nerdy" about design, poetry, physics, history and geography. I tried to make this as short as I possibly could. But it's long.

I love music, even though I'm not a musician myself and I can't carry a tune to save my life. And given that I don't limit music by genre, country or any other measurements, I've always liked Eurovision. I still remember how happy we were back when Yugoslavia won in 1989 with Riva's "Rock Me Baby". That was the year I started school, at six and half years of age, and that was the song we all knew to sing regardless of how informed and mature we were.

This year, my home country is represented by a performer I did not vote for, Milan Stanković, and despite never having liked him and the song being more or less of a nonsense, I hope people will appreciate our Balkans rhythms. So, good luck to him...but unlike any year before, I won't urge people to vote for Serbia. In 2007, I probably lost some weight running around, bugging all my foreign friends etc, but not this year.

I have a habit of not checking the songs other than Serbia's own until one week before the contest takes place. This year, I actually regret having done so, as I could've gotten involved with promoting things I feel strongly about much earlier.

I know Ukraine had a whole scandal revolving around the voting. My dear friend from Kyiv explained me what happened and I took a listen to the final entry, Alyosha's "Sweet People" and I thought it could have a political background, revolving around a specific event that I read a lot about and that probably gets Ukrainians a bit annoyed by me, as I keep on asking questions all the time and planning a trip to one of the loneliest places in the world.

Last week, revisiting the song and finally watching the video, I realised I was right and that it wasn't another case of me seing the CH-word in everything. It really is a song revolving around what my foreign friends usually refer to as "that big nuclear thing" and I even got it right that the author herself feels connected to it for an additional reason of being born during the initial chaos.

Still have no clue?

26th April 2011, a date only 11 months away, will mark a 1/4 of the century from the Chernobyl disaster - the worst thing that has ever struck this planet and that will probably end up killing more people than WWI and WWII together. How many is that? We'll never know. It will be a slow, painful death. The reports vary, but all of those numbers have at least six digits. Amongst them, it could be you. You, you, you, you, you. Me, too. It could be anyone. It's not even limited to just us Europeans.

And who is to blame? Humans. We've always been careless, we've always been taking everything for granted and, on this particular continent, standard is probably higher than anywhere else. We're addicted to new. We don't learn to know, we learn to impress/get the money/get the good grade and then we forget. Exceptions are only proving the rule. RBMK reactor was a Mickey Mouse type of a solution. As all the solutions of such kind are destined to doom, it's actually a wonder than only the reactor 4 at the ЧАЕС exploded.

Type the word "disaster" in Google search. Type "April 1986". These as well as many other terms will return this disaster as a result. Hadn't there been a prompt reaction, Europe would've faced some sort of an eschaton.

I feel strongly about this topic. I have implemented it, either directly or as analogy/metaphor/hyperbole in my own poetry, comparing it to interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts. It changed the way I look at the world, it changed my priorities. At the same time, it taught me to appreciate life, but not in the Rhonda Byrne way (please...don't even get me started). On the contrary: in a realistic way, where I'm giving both to myself and the others, caring about the place I'm living in, hugging my black locust tree once a day and not buying things I don't need.

If you're not a typical self-proclaimed "hedonist", "weird", "crazy", "a positive thinker", "crazy about sex" or whatever worn out stereotype label you glued onto your forehead just because you saw everybody else do so...stop for a second. Open your eyes. Rewind the film. Have a look around the worldwide web, I recommend documentaries titled Heavy Water, White Horse as well as Irene Zabytko's book "The Sky Unwashed". Listen to Jacob Kirkegaard's "Four Rooms" EP, he recorded silence, he recorded sounds of places where people rarely ever roam. Think what it would be like if a couple of seconds of bad decisions and machinery malfunction changed the life of one entire continent, chased generations from their homes once again? There's no second chance.

There aren't second chances for erradicted species unless people take action. There aren't second chances for billions of trees being paved every year. Ecological responsibility is not a trend, not a fad, it's a must and it should be a mandatory part of everybody's daily life.

Got the point by now? Great. :)

My vote tonight goes to Ukraine and Alyosha. The cause, common sense and the campaign made the nature of everything else fade in comparison.