The country where it's your fault you're in a coma: “Lady, we've done everything we can, now it's his job to fight!”

Of the thousands of lines written after the Collective, not a single one comes to mind now. But what other people have said or written I sometimes remember, with a precision that makes me feel totalitarian. I'm stuck in a thought, the way you feel on confused mornings, when you're barely awake and can't get out of the dream that keeps you in its state.

In one of the first days after October 30, 2015, when the wounded had arrived in the hospitals, I managed, in the newsroom, to record a dialogue between the relatives of the wounded and a doctor from the Bucharest Emergency University Hospital.

What was heard from the discussion

Also faced with a crisis of unprecedented magnitude, people in the medical system struggled to communicate. However, the way in which they were organized was of that era.

In the afternoon, a boss would come into the hospital amphitheater and talk to the “members”. In one of the discussions, the medical officer told the parents of a burned young man in a coma: “Ma'am, we did everything we could, now it's his job to fight!”.

Someone in the family recorded with the phone. He gave us permission to publish. I froze as I listened. Because we recognized the slogans that followed us from before 1989. It was always your fault. If you caught a cold, you were guilty. If you were on your knees, you were guilty. If you got appendicitis, you were guilty. If your table swelled, you were guilty. And look, little one, even when you end up in a coma, with no control and no power, it's still your fault “for not fighting.”

When you get rewarded if you take a shortcut

I also remember the observation that appeared in an article in the foreign press. The journalist said that “human life turns out to have little value in a society where not only can you cheat, but you are even rewarded for taking shortcuts.”

And now I feel respect for those words, for how well they describe something essential in Romania. We did as much as we could, like so many other Romanian journalists. After Colectiv, the Italian edition of Rolling Stone wrote that the Romanians “teach us how to do journalism, in an era of reports from the sofa”.

But the characterization of how our society is built “not just to cheat, but to be rewarded if you cut corners” I didn't get. Someone, theoretically distant from our realities, could better describe the life of every living in Romania.

The confrontation with Gâdea and Badea

At one point, after I investigated, together with Mirela Neag and Răzvan Luțac, the cases of nosocomial infections, the corruption at ISU and the Hexi Pharma file, Antena 3 invited me to a dialogue “against” Mihai Gâdea and Mircea Badea. Those from Antenă criticized our work, sometimes night after night.

Two camps had been born that did not remain indebted, as a reflection of two currents in society, expressing broader opinions than any of us. We were on opposite sides of the painfully unfolding events.

I accepted the challenge of A3 because I don't divide the public into “good” and “bad”. Dialogue is important, especially when we disagree.

The show took place in the late summer of 2016 and created quite a stir. It was a TV showdown, preserved on Youtube, that each man watched in his key, probably according to already set preferences. But some information and diverse opinions were received by the public, no matter in which camp people considered themselves fixed.

The need to talk

We got up from the chair, after almost two and a half hours. I was squeezed. I looked at Mircea Badea, who was standing two meters away. The searchlights dimmed in silence. There was not an iota of resentment in his eyes. We were coming after in 2015 and 2016 we had fought hard, from a distance. It seemed to me that he too, tireless for so many years on TV, was somehow at peace with himself. We had finished another duel, but this time face to face, without being enemies.

When I got out into the fresh air, I went behind a warehouse. I asked Alexander Nanau, to whom I am still grateful today for having the patience to understand our job, to hold my backpack for a bit, because I could no longer stand on my feet.

10 years have passed since the Collective. The polarization of Romania is today a record. The “can't-more-can-do” fatigue became even greater. There is no limit to negative social phenomena, sociologist Alin Teodorescu once said.

Honestly, how many of us imagined such a split? We are in 2025, as a society, more enmity. An enormous amount of money is invested by those who do not support our freedom, so that it seems that we have no achievement and no common denominator.

But what depends on us, depends on us. And I don't know if “our job is just to fight, ma'am,” as parents were told back then, in this case to always fight with each other, or to sit down and talk. Some of the patients in the University Hospital came back to life, but we fell into a coma of mutual contempt.