Jan Stary

WANT UPDATES?

If you want to be informed about updates on these pages via email and you are not on my mailing list, please let me know by sending an email to janstary@comcast.net. Thank you.

Politics and Conscience

In 1984, Vaclav Havel, former Czech President wrote from his house arrest in Prague a speech that he would have presented at the University of Toulouse, had he been allowed into the country by the then Czechoslovak communist regime. The speech was about the abuse of power by politicians. It talks about the “power operating outside all conscience, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth…power which makes thought, morality and privacy a state monopoly and so dehumanizes them.”

I recalled Havel’s observation last week as I was reading through the news in different independent sources and confronted their perspective with the reality of the American real-politik. The major players on Capitol Hill and in the White House certainly seem to believe they have secured for themselves a power that doesn’t have to “brush against the truth” any longer.

Just take the tribal dance around the brain-dead Ms. Schiavo. It was obviously not about her. It was not about her disunited family either. As we heard from many Republican vigilantes, it was about the “right to life”. Mr. President made yet another dramatic landing of his presidential career, this time on the lawn of the White House to patronize the hesitant disbelievers and slap the hands of the Florida judges involved in the case for the last 10+ years. “Our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life”, he said in a preacher’s voice. Amen, one should exclaim. But then one’s conscience brushes the former Governor Bush’s conscience against his own Texas Futile Care Bill from 1999 that has allowed hospitals to stop feeding Terry Schiavos of Texas on condition that the patient’s prognosis is not good, the further care would be futile, and the family has no means to pay for the medical bills. In the light of this truth, the President’s early morning White House homily made a bitter twist towards a farce.

As if the sanctity of life started and ended with a brain-dead woman in Florida. An absurd diagnosis by Senator Bill Frist via an edited video tape apart, Tom the “Ethics Incarnate” DeLay took over where President Bush left off and tried to translate religious dogma into a law in the Congress. The power of his thoughtful and heartfelt speech about the “huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in” has waned face to face his own acts. Of course, his imperial “we” may be in conflict with the rest of “us” who believe in morality and ethics in the first place.

Both Bush and DeLay have turned themselves into a live evidence that monopolizing thought, morality, and privacy dehumanizes them all: an independent thought turns into a faceless demagoguery, morality turns itself into its own faceless caricature, and privacy gets publicly executed in the name of the dubious political goal.

Havel talked about an authoritative communist regime without a face. Sad enough, Bush and DeLay speak for the superpower perceived by many in the world as the bastion of democracy and humanity.

Dreaming for Good

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.