A minister with a shovel, what’s weird in that?

Demagogical trick, self-advertising or a real deal? In a case of Fred Matic, a minister who cleared access to isolated villages of Zumberak along with his crew of war veterans - it actually is a real deal. Matic doesn’t act as a ‘’showroom’’ minister. Population of war veterans have kept in touch even after the war was over. It is easy to motivate them, to organize them even to bring them to isolated villages with snow shovels, and Matic is one of them as well. They didn’t fake that as he didn’t fake that either.

They did something good for other people, and they felt good as well. Matic who is a minister now, a state deputy and the member of political elite who is commonly steeped in snobbism, did a step forward. If small people are blocked in snow, if the problem can’t be solved with mechanization, why a minister of this little country like Croatia wouldn’t take a shovel in his hands? Or would we prefer to see him carrying similar tools on symbolic occasions of construction openings, that would also dragged him out from ‘’mental’’ work for a purpose of political marketing, as it doesn’t bring benefit to regular people.

Matic’s action in Zumberak is very positive in a sense of suppression of collective apathy, a feeling of weakness and uselessness that crept into Croatian society. The situation has been been like that for a long time so only few could help one selves and then they find it hard to help somebody else. The group of war veterans along with one minister who clear snow together to help isolated inhabitants of Zumebrak’s hills, were in that sense an encouraging scene.

Even a minister of health Rajko Ostojic is trying to find a connection with reality. Although people can contact him with letters and over the Internet, he has decided to find time once a week to contact those people and their associations in person. The both sides will benefit, as the unsatisfied users of health services and the minister himself who will get an immediate insight of problems certain group of patients deal within the current organization of health care.

Sure, this act as Matic’s cleaning the snow can be interpreted as demagogical wheedling to public, but why wouldn’t we reverse those things and start to consider it normal when one minister isn’t ashamed of physical work as well as the other who considers a contact with regular crowd as a part of his regular job.