It's been nearly a month since the 1000 anniversary of Thang Long - Hanoi but I'm still keeping parts of my thoughts for it. Maybe the fact that I can still see posters, band rolls of the ceremony everywhere, I am reminded of it once in a while.
It gave me lots of impression; however, not all of them were nice. I remember a huge amount of money being spent, more than 90 thousand billion VND, a tenth of our GDP. And to be honest, not all of that amount went to useful things. I appreciated that people built and widened roads, that they built a museum, that they had activities with purposes of telling stories of Hanoi a thousand year and there were so many things I felt grateful for. Like, constructions were pushed up, the capital looked so glorious and everyone was expecting. Although I was not from Hanoi, somehow I was proud that I lived here.
But a celebration like that was hold, seemingly, the true value of a thousand year standing had been misunderstood. A thousand year was only treated as a number and nothing more. It was like an old man celebrating his 100 birthday and no one cared what he had done his whole life. There was one man with an article I read somewhere just recently; he suggested that in stead of counting from a thousand to one till the anniversary, they should put the number of national debt there and count. Of course, should that happen, the whole country would be even more eager to see it gradually go to zero. Why until an event like this did people decorate, did people try to increase productivity. So what actually lay within. Was it truly for the sake of the whole country, or was it because it was a thousand year. Was it the heart and the soul or the face and the clothes.
While a lot of people in the central of Vietnam suffered from flood, even now they haven't recovered; some was asking what was in it for them, what was for them from The Thousand. It'a kinda sad to me through the celebration. The only joy was to see Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung abandon Hanoi and travel to flooded areas