Life is an exercise in injustice, to put it sententiously. Health and wealth, love and luck, power and fame all come and go in ways few of us can fathom. Sooner or later, we accept our lot with peace. But times of rapid social change are different, because the capriciousness of it all comes into plain view for a brief while. The demise of socialism and acquisition of statehood have changed Croatia in fundamental ways. Many of the injustices in evidence today are new and thus difficult to bear. Most people I talk to or overhear in Istria are bitching and moaning about their lot. The dust will settle in a decade or so, but by then new fundamental changes will be upon this tortured land. The entry into the European Union will be one such. And the exercise will go on.