I want to talk about hope and about freedom the way I imagined it in my rock-n-roll infused youth behind the iron curtain. Before I do, let me serve up two contrasting quotes about hope. Here’s Anne Frank:
“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
And here is Field Chaplain Otto Katz, one of the funniest characters from Jaroslav Hasek’s epic novel “The Good Soldier Svejk”:
“Of course, worthy sir, allow me to repeat once more, that the word “hope” is a great strength to man in his struggle with life. And you don’t lose hope. How wonderful it is to have a definite ideal, to be an innocent, pure being, who lends money on bills of exchange and has the hope he will be paid back at the right time. To hope, to hope unremittingly that I shall pay you twelve hundred crowns, when I haven’t even a hundred in my pocket!”
Katz then kicks the creditor down the stairs from his apartment
The Czech nation has always been much better at the second kind of hope: believing hope is a lovely, pure sentiment but something that never works out in the real world. Their history has confirmed the correctness of their belief time and time again. Pushed from the west by the Germans and from the East by Russians, occasionally by the Swedes from the North and the Hungarians from the South East, hoping for anything resembling freedom was regarded as folly. Nihilism has proved to be the healthier attitude: one never got disappointed. Czechs often repeat a quote attributed to Hasek, though I have never found it in his book in this precise form: “Keep calm and keep your feet warm” Czechs didn’t ask if the new ruler, whether he spoke German or Russian, would be more lenient than the previous ruler. They asked a more important question: “Will the beer still flow freely and will be affordable?” If the answer was yes, and it always was, the great majority of the nation was satisfied.
And then came 1967 and 1968. Voices were heard on TV and radio that did not sound stilted and that did not repeat tired phrases (“The Soviet Union - our model”) Western “decadent” music filled the airwaves. There was talk of modernizing the economy, allowing small private businesses to operate and then later, in January 1968, the leadership changed and the floodgates fully opened. Foreign travel - unrestricted. Free press - unrestricted. Free gatherings - unrestricted. And suddenly, the nihilism of ages washed away like spring rains sweeping away dirty snow. People actually hoped. They hoped the Anne Frank type hope, not the jaded, mocking Otto Katz hope. My own hopes and plans were enormous: I was going to be the Czech John Lennon…or Bob Dylan…or at least Mick Jagger!
The hope and the elation lasted until August 21, 1968 when Moscow got tired of the Czech liberty mosquito biting the Soviet corpus and crushed the liberation in one fell swoop. Within less than a year, the important thing once again was to “keep calm, keep your feet warm and keep the beer flowing” and Czech simply reverted to the old truth pertaining while living under a heavy boot: hope is for losers.
And that, my dear friends, is a little bit the way I feel now. Having seen the abject surrender of the American people in the last three years - surrender to Public Health mandarins, surrender to trans activism, surrender to politicized judges drunk on power, just a complete surrender of the values that attracted me to this country as far back as the 1960 and finally helped me decide to settle here at the age of 59, my own sense of hope now resembles that of the good old field chaplain.
BUT
On the other hand, I never forget the words f the brilliant Vaclav Havel (btw: pronounced “Vahtzlav”), first President of democratic Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism, as well as a wonderful playwright and philosopher:
”The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility”
and
“Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance”
When I was in the fifth grade our teacher Mr Owen got really serious one day and out of the blue told us we had a choice to make, we could chose to be an optimist or choose to be a pessimist, he explained the difference and I remember thinking, “I’m going to choose to be an optimist!” Sixty years later I have to say it’s been hard to follow my little fifth grader heart especially after observing the cowardice of half of America with their response to Covid and vaccines, the craven greed of the pharmaceutical companies and the moronic politicians on the left. But I’m still CHOOSING to believe “that people are really good at heart” I don’t want to live life as a pessimist!
"Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Anne Frank
Yet, the disappointment you (and I) felt when the boomer generation's hope dissolved into power plays, money corruption, and irresponsible dreams of free love proved yet again, mankind is desperately wicked, hopelessly irredeemable.
People are not really good at heart. We are despicable, given the chance.