When the Hubble telescope was launched in 1990, scientists here on earth soon discovered that its mirror had a defect. Although the defect was less than 4% the diameter of a human hair, it significantly distorted the telescope's vision, forcing NASA to launch a costly repair mission three years later.
The distortion to my vision of the world has a different nature and certainly bears much less scientific signifcance. Nonetheless, it creates a different view - one that I've recently found to be of interest to some.
I was born in the Belorusssian Soviet Socialistic Republic in early 1986, 2 months before the Chernobyl disaster happened just 250 miles away from my home city. When the USSR crumbled in August of 1991 and national television broadcasted tanks in central Moscow, I was too young to understand the magnitude of the event; yet I clearly remember how on my very first day of school, September 1st of that year, the teacher made everyone cross out the phrase 'My Motherland is Soviet Union' from the textbook and write 'My motherland is Belarus' instead. I travelled abroad with a Soviet passport until the age of 13 - just because there was nothing to replace it with. It took even longer for people's mentality to change. In fact, for many it never did. The country itself remains a caricature of the Communist past - a point well illustrated by the recent currency devaluation and 1991-style food shortages.
I've lived abroad for 8 years now, 6 of them in the United States. This experience has profoundly affected my vision of the world, but the vision remains permanently distorted by echoes of the past, leading to a somewhat different perspective on the world's events. I will attempt to share my perspective in this journal.
