The responsible persons and institutions you are looking for are currently unreachable!

I would like to begin this article by wishing mercy upon our citizens who lost their lives in the hotel fire that took place in Kartalkaya last week. 

This fire, which clearly broke out as a result of a series of negligences and lack of inspections, showed me that I have inwardly resigned myself to a characterization that I do not particularly like to use: Turkey is a country of disasters. What makes it a country of disasters is, at times, a lack of inspection, at times greed for money, at times a "nothing will happen anyway" attitude, at times impunity, and beyond that, injustice…

And most of the time, it is a combination of all of them. What is even more painful is that the responsibility for the heavy toll caused by this entire combination is not assumed by a single person or institution. In short: The Responsible Persons and Institutions You Are Looking For Are Currently Unreachable! Moreover, they remain unreachable even when we try again later.

This is the case when a fire breaks out in a hotel, when an earthquake occurs, when a flood hits a region, or when a collapse occurs in a mine or an explosion in a factory. Resignation is a concept that has long been buried in the depths of the old Turkey. Requests for relief from duty have long had nothing to do with failing in one's job.

As I write these lines, the media was still discussing who was responsible. Yet, in this fire, children, sons, daughters, and grandchildren on semester break died. Just as the traces of some children, sons, daughters, and grandchildren have still not been found after the February earthquakes. The responsible parties sought there were also unreachable. 

In the fire that broke out in Kartalkaya, the scene I see as a citizen is this: After a fire in which children on semester break lost their lives, we, as a nation, tried to learn whose responsibility it was to grant permits for tourist businesses, to inspect them, and to provide fire department services. But actually, we are used to this, even if in different ways. Aren't we the ones who memorize regulations after an earthquake? Doesn't a workplace accident (or more accurately, a murder) suddenly turn us into occupational safety experts? Contrary to what we think, these do not reflect an instinct for awareness, but rather the struggle of the lonely individual, the public without a public sphere, to fend for themselves. 

Do lists of what we can do personally solve our problem? Absolutely not. This is our most useless, most problematic skill: closing everything off into the individual sphere and assuming the responsibility ourselves. Our obligation to pay a fortune for a hotel for a vacation and then check whether the building has a fire escape or if it complies with earthquake regulations, or our feeling that participating in aid campaigns is a duty despite paying a significant portion of our salary as taxes… This list unfortunately goes on and on. 

So, what is the prescription? Actually, there is an answer: The political sphere. But let's admit that when we think about it for a public-oriented discourse, approach, or activism, that sphere is also in a huge deadlock with all its actors.

I think the "great despair" of the masses is knotted here as well. As for whether this knot can be untied, I am of the opinion that the emotional state of many people can be summarized with a reference to Demirel: If we say it in one word, hopeful; if we say it in two words, not hopeful…