Who owes whom?

[Addendum: edited for clarification purposes after posting]

I don't generally like commenting on Diasporan issues though I do from time to time because, frankly, it usually just frustrates and irritates me further. However, I just read a piece on Ianyan Magazine that made me want to post a comment on the article which already has a number of comments. Rather than blather on as a comment there, I thought I'd write my musings here.

The article, in the form of a Letter from the Editor, recounts the editor's interaction with and subsequent musings about an Armenian gentleman. It starts as follows:

“The motherland should be best loved from afar,” a man said to me the other day, “or else it will sting you.”

My reaction to the man's words were immediate, and of course developed further as I read the piece. The man's father was from Cyprus, the man himself had left Armenia in the 90's and moved to Hollywood, and had returned to the US in one year. So the story is not so simple - though we have no other information about him, he seems to have been of a Diasporan lineage that relocated at some point to Armenia, and he relocated back out in the 90s, and tried to go back. Two separate generations of moving to Armenia, which is 2 times more than most Diasporan families.

It seems clear in the article that the man did not necessarily want to leave, and in fact wishes he could have stayed, that he is sad to have (had to?) leave, for whatever reason. And this is a relatively common story on one level or another - families or businesses that try to start or relocate to Armenia meet with so much difficulty in terms of finding jobs or corrupt taxation or bureaucracy, that they end up unable to stay. I am not comparing the hardship of those who do live in Armenia to those who try to relocate. That is irrelevant to my point (which I will get to soon enough), and my purpose is not to compare or judge. There are those who have tried and succeeded in moving from the outside to Armenia, and some who have tried and failed.

What I would like to point out is his wording. To "love the homeland from afar", or "she will sting you." Of course it is a sentence of sadness. And perhaps in this context, thats all there was to it. I was not there for the conversation. The editor ends the article, it seems, curious, wondering, maybe a little sad herself, but saying "its worth the risk." I agree, it is worth it, but that is only the beginning... I would take it much further...

I have been in conversations where similar comments are made about Armenia. And in these contexts, as can be imagined for argument's sake may have occurred in this conversation, there is a sense of hurt. And that hurt is linked to a sense of something having been done to the speaker. Armenia should have been a certain way, it was not, and therefore Armenia caused someone pain/hurt. As though Armenia were a single entity, an entity which owes me, you, Armenians in general.
That is a sense of entitlement. To say, well, Armenia hurt me, so its better to stay far from it (to perhaps abandon it completely as a real place, and leave it only as an idea), to say that I will just glance at it from time to time because it hurt me and wasn't what it was supposed to be, because it did not live up to my ideals, that is entitlement.

And this sentiment was rampant in the 90s in the Diaspora, and is still rampant in a mutated form today. Because Armenia, to so many Diasporans, was and is not a land with an entire population, a people, who live and breathe every day. But rather, Armenia was and is a homeland, a pedestalized (perhaps no longer in the mutated version) 'homeland' where soil is fertile, flowers bloom without bees, streets pave themselves, and all is well and good. Undesired and frowned upon realities of any and all societies - poverty, violence, prostitution, 'immorality' - all those things to which people often say "Amot," the things that of course 'real Armenians' anywhere do not do, they did not exist in Armenia.

That was the imagined, the pedestalized Armenia that so many expected. And of course it fell short.

And so there have been since the early 90s and continue to be comments about Armenia, 'it's dirty, 'it's corrupt'... and stories about thievery and scams that happen to Diasporans... and comments like 'X is just soo bad in Armenia,'...

And when I hear that, what I was reminded of when I read the man's statement in the letter from the editor, is that sense of entitlement.

What I always want to say back when I hear such things, is well, if it so bad, what are you, as a self-identified Armenian, doing to make it better?
How can you possibly feel satisfied with visiting Armenia, leaving and criticizing, and then going back in two years and repeating the cycle all over again?

If you, and I, and all of us, if we are all Armenian, then we are all part of this great idealized nation; Armenia is not just a homeland, but a land of people, of the Armenian people - Armenia IS the people and population of Armenia, with millions of actual Armenians, not just an entity which exists to provide Diasporans with a sense of idealized homeland and a nice vacation spot.

I suppose that is what JFK meant when he said: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

If we truly want to be part of a great nation with a great Homeland, then it is not the Homeland that owes us, but we, as individuals of a nation, that owe and must build the Homeland.

The question of whether it is worth it is easy, but almost irrelevant.

The real question is, can we be worthy of the Armenia of which we all dream?