The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow… (Robert H. Goddard)
I praise individual freedom above all values in my life. I was born into an oppressive communist regime that seemed at most times an eternal obstacle, a gravestone under which all dreams and hopes would be buried even before they could be born. The omnipresent disbelief and sometimes an open contempt of freedom on the part of the officials pretty much set a tone for my childhood and young adulthood. All my career decisions had to be measured against the stifling reality of the communist establishment, in which a child of parents not conforming with the official ideology had just a close-to-zero chance to pursuit his dreams.
A strange thing happens when you are left just with your dreams. Not only that the dreams don’t go away as one might assume. They stubbornly grow in their strength. The more you realize how monstrous odds are against you, the more you seem to foster your dreams. Dreams develop a strange immunity face to face a hostile environment.
Oddly enough, I never pictured a life in a foreign country where my dreams might come true instantly. I always vividly pictured a day when they’d come true in my own country. I knew about many countrymen who emigrated. They left the country because they wanted to implement their dreams right away. I don’t blame them. Time is always a factor in our lives, and time was simply more important for them than the place. I always believed that leaving one’s home country seeking a refuge -- economic or political – elsewhere required as much courage and determination as a decision to stay. Both meant hardships of considerable proportions.
Still, I never regretted my decision to stay and keep on nourishing my dream while others pursued successful careers in emigration. November 17th 1989 came. On that very day, at five in the afternoon sharp, I finally stood up for my rights. I stood up for freedom. I raised my head and went out to say to the oppressive regime: No more! I overcame the fear and decided to go out to the streets with fifty thousand other strangers who had been dreaming the same dream in the silence of their homes.
These people in the streets were free to leave their country. They were also free to stay and acquiesce in the present state of affairs. Yet all of a sudden, they threw away their fears and calculations. They freely decided to go out. To do something about their lives at any cost. It’s not important for me, when it happened. From today’s perspective, it’s not even important why it happened. What is important is the fact itself, the fact that it happened. Why? Because that very moment – my decision to do the right thing at any cost -- that moment precisely defined for me the real value of freedom.
Isn’t it rather paradoxical? In most situations, free people use their freedom to make choices that are least costly. When we go shopping in a free market environment, the idea is always to get the best for the least, isn’t it? The common sense dictates us to be “smart”. Shop “smartly” for goods, jobs, for entertainment. Even in a political sense, “smart” decisions seem to be those that don’t cost us reputation, audience (read: voters), personal prestige… A “smart” politician does not make right decisions at any cost, certainly not at the cost of losing votes from his voters. That is one of the paradoxes -- and of course -- illusions of the free democratic societies: a wrong belief that freedom does not cost us anything once we have it. It is taken for granted. Given the situation at this time, in this country, and in this world, it also seems to be, unfortunately, the first step to losing it. After all, cheap goods always go fastest, right?
The very first time I saw Vaclav Havel, then still a dissident (and only later the president) speak from the balcony of an apartment building in Wenceslas Square in Prague at an impromptu speech about the better future lying in our freed hands and freed minds, I recollected a conversation I had five years earlier in New York.
Then I was visiting my sister -- an act of unusual benevolence of the communists who eventually let this 23 years old student go and see his sister after weeks of bizarre negotiations with the government authorities. It was a year I expected to graduate from Charles University. While in New York, my first trip ever to the non-communist country, I met with a number of Czech emigrants. Among others I met with a Czech émigré from the 1950’s Frank Daniel, then a co-chair at the Film Department of Columbia University. (The other chair was director Milos Forman, another prominent Czech ex-patriot). At an informal party thrown to “honor my visit” somewhere in upstate New York, Frank and his wife tried to convince me I should stay in the U.S. and apply for a postgraduate study at Frank’s department. Frank really took to me and he even promised right there that a scholarship would be secured for me, thus the enormous expenses taken care of. All I had to do was stay. This was in April 1984, the new semester at Columbia would start in September.
I admit it was a tempting idea. But I also knew that had I decided to stay, it would have been for selfish reasons and the motivation would have been machiavellian. Basically, I would have traded my integrity for personal freedom at someone else’s expense. Particularly, at the expense of the person, who would have paid for my scholarship, and at the expense of my family and friends back at home, who did not have that option and who would have been badly persecuted for my defection. In other words, I didn’t want to buy the best for the least costly. I didn’t want to be “smart”.
Needless to say that once I decided not to be “smart”, I was called stupid. Paradoxically, I heard it both from those who had generously and in their ignorance unselfishly offered me the privileges I refused, as much as from those whose peace of mind I had on my mind when I was making that tough decision. The generous ex-patriots didn’t understand. They meant good for me and I disappointed them. They surely considered me ungrateful, which I understood. They were right, from their point of view. My friends back in Prague, at least some of them, didn’t understand either. Columbia, Big Apple, big world, big names…all that at no cost! They also wished me good. And they were right, too, from their point of view. No, it wasn’t “smart”.
Have I ever regretted? Sure, I had moments in those long five years that followed. I was deprived of any qualified jobs as a part of my punishment for not collaborating with the regime (ironically, the visit in the U.S. itself was a major factor in this political retaliation against me, as I learned from one of the Secret Police officers during an interrogation while I was desperately applying for jobs I was qualified for). I thought many times about the decision I had made in New York, and I weighed it against the misery I got myself into afterwards.
But then I went out to the streets with an unprecedented number of other fellow citizens… An act of sheer madness, when you think about it. Hundreds of Russian tanks in the country, thousands of armed communist militia ready to defend the privileges of the long-time oppressors at any cost. And here I am, shaking with fear in a cold late-November night, standing under the balcony from where Vaclav Havel encourages an impromptu crowd to stand up for our dreams. I am thinking five years back when freedom was so close -- for so cheap.
On that cold November day, we all made a free decision to come. We also made a promise to come again the next day. And then again the next one. For the first time in our lives, we felt freedom in our hands. Almost literally. We felt free to act. To make the right decision and go for our dreams at any cost. None of us knew the cost yet. All we knew was that the cost was not a factor.
I don’t feel like a hero. I never felt like a hero. I never was. In fact, I know I was a coward for years thinking there was no way to change the “present state of affairs”. But I was a dreamer. And today I know the years of my cowardly dreaming had their purpose. In the end, I experienced an incredible moment of a dream coming true. That experience also put the right price-tag on freedom for me. I learned a lesson that no school could ever teach me.
I sometimes wish the kids in this great country of unlimited opportunities could have taken that same class with me. Their world would have fewer “smart” shoppers. It would be in a better shape. As for me, I know I will never shop cheap again.
Freedom is a dream that can never be oppressed forever. It will always rear its head and establish itself in some form or fashion, simply because it is written on the soul of every creation. We should trust in the movement of freedom in the people of the world, so that they can claim the lesson that Jan has wrought. Those of us who have not fought for our own freedom can never appreciate it as much as those who have. Thanks Jan for sharing the beauty of true freedom with all of us and for standing for freedom with all of your fellow countrymen. You may not believe you are a hero, but you are human in the fullest sense.
Posted by: Greg | April 05, 2005 at 10:44 AM