It's time to sound the alarm. Poland is losing its national characteristics. A little more and it won't be itself.
The traditional Polish road - pothole, narrow or nonexistent - is going into oblivion. For the first time in history , our country has a decent network of decent streets, national highways, expressways and highways. Not perfect, but correct, which is a precedent in our history.
For the first time, Poland is also generally clean rather than dirty, with the exception of wild dumps, landfills of some fantastic poisons and other secretive ecobabble. And excluding the air, which deserves a decent wash. However, when we hear that, admittedly, we have one subway for the whole country, but for that we have the cleanest in Europe, and that visitors from this mythical Europe praise the clean licked streets of Polish cities, more: they adore our roadside wucets, we already know that we have lost our peculiar stickiness and muddiness - an all-Polish gumbo straight out of Chełmoński's paintings, interwar and PRL photos. Slawoj Składkowski looks at us from a cloud and sends beaming smiles.
If it goes on like this, it will be necessary to locally reconstruct the historic pre-Polish mud. Especially since, according to statistics, we are one of the fastest concreting countries in the Union. Astonishingly, the old dream of being a second Japan, which after the war made the flywheel of the economy precisely from pouring concrete everywhere and in abundance, is coming true. A wheel that eventually got bogged down in that concrete.
However, we are not yet Japan in the field of rail transportation. But there is a chance that the coming decades will bring us perhaps not widespread shinkansenization, but - finally - a decent railroad. Not for the first time in general, but for the first time in a very long time. Just as twenty years ago we took on roads, now we are taking on tracks, trains and stations, and again it may turn out that a Pole can do something after all. One thing that is still out of the question is the return of a meaningful network of PKSs, which is part of the Polish tradition of cutting off large areas of the interior from the world, interrupted by the awful and evil People's Republic of Poland. So we won't be renationalized so completely.
Finally, we are slowly beginning to saturate ourselves with buildings, from philharmonic halls, libraries, cultural centers and offices to a huge and, fortunately, old-fashioned sprawl of housing. The saturation will still continue, but even so, we are slowly leaving the time of the romanticism of construction (and, with the exception of housing, ever-better architecture), and entering the positivist Great Boredom. Into decades of unspectacular administration of what we have built and opened with pomp and EU assistance. After the investment high comes the maintenance downhill. There goes the time not of wizards and daring investors, but of administrators, managers and technicians, who will already have to take care of the legacy of the past decades without pomp and fanfare. It's also going, hopefully, the time of patching all of today's holes and potential disasters - from health care, education and housing to truly efficient defense.
And to take proper care , one needs greater sensitivity, up-to-date knowledge and awareness of, for example, the aesthetic and architectural value of what needs to be kept in good shape. It also takes management skills far removed from the poetics of the manor. Here, however, for the time being, we often cling to traditions based on the archetype of Mr. Zenk: patching, patching, repairing
least cost, blunt austerity. Traditions upheld by another tradition, that is, by an unwillingness to make mental effort, to take forward-looking action, to analyze the situation factually, and to pour money into research, science and specialists. For example, for architects, who in the future will be useful in effective adaptation and modernization rather than erecting more cubicles.
So we still don't realize as strongly as we should that when you have everything new at once, you then have everything old at once, as is being experienced today not only by the States, but also by Germany or Italy patching up hastily falling apart infrastructure. We are experiencing this ourselves, by the way, only in a different area. We are rapidly aging a society that was "new" in the first post-war decades. Here we are, for the first time in history, aging so massively and - not for the first time - growing old in poverty. It won't be spectacular poverty. Trapped in houses without elevators, seniors and senior citizens with pensions of two thousand plus will either not be able to go out on the town, or will have nothing to go for. Or both. Most won't be seen either in the upscale tabernacles of culinary pornography or at a regular coffee shop. They won't be at concerts, screenings and resorts. They won't fill all those newly built cubicles with EU money. The only hope is that, in their mass, the gap will be filled by younger people, because for the first time, Poles are so fat that they need more space per individual citizen.
Finally, retirees will not take advantage of another Japanese patent. After all, Japanese seniors are as numerous as they are poor, and it is not uncommon for them to commit a deliberate petty crime in the fall. They then spend the winter in a decent prison on a state-run rickshaw. Our prisons, however, are not decent. Nowhere to be rescued. It doesn't even pay to go to Germany, because there and social welfare not what it used to be (probably including prisons), and in some areas Germany has to chase Poland. So it is chasing us in digitization, because our e-offices, e-courts, e-prescriptions, in general e-everything beats German standards by a wide margin. In fact, they have become so caught up with us that they have also caught up with the recent level of our railroads. Verspätung is a word they can permanently engrave on the departure boards.
At the same time, Poland, in the opinion of some Germans, is starting to point-blank remind them of their own country from better times. Very dangerous. Once we lose most of our national characteristics and turn into a second Germany, we will mistakenly demand reparations from ourselves.
Jakub Głaz
Read more: A&B 12/2025 - RE-THINK - MBA Kraków 2025,
download free e-issues of A&B
