Anchor

I spent Independence Day and most of the first week of July hosting a family from Czech Republic in our home.  Eight years ago, we volunteered to host the daughter of this family for a summer program.  This summer, she returned with her parents who speak minimal English (although more English than my Czech, which is pretty much limited to “cheers!”).  There is something incredibly powerful and also humbling about inviting a foreign stranger to stay in your home.  Following World War II, when it was abundantly clear that we were in great need of international goodwill, programs like the Fulbright were developed to foster the exchange of ideas between nations.  Unfortunately, the world at large remains in dire need of international goodwill, but I still want to believe that it is possible to bridge the gaps that divide us by building personal relationships with those we perceive as different from us.

I was the lucky recipient of another family’s commitment to international goodwill in 1989, when I participated in a program in Paris.  1989 was the bicentennial of the beginning of the French Revolution, which was a divisive and violent period of paranoia and misguided patriotism, but which ultimately gave the world one of the fundamental documents for human rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was of course modeled after the American Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.  I studied the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1989 as I visited sites impacted by the Revolution.  It was easy to get caught up in the spectacle of the celebrations, especially while singing La Marseillaise in the streets around Place de la Bastille while swigging from passing bottles of wine and dodging errant firecrackers.  But the best part was developing relationships and interacting with the French, which isn’t easy, as any tourist will tell you.  But I insist that it is worth the effort.

It is worth the effort to go outside of your comfort zone.  It is worth the effort to learn another language, even if only the most basic tourist essentials (please, thank you, hello, goodbye, thank you, thank you, thank you).  It is worth the effort to study the history and culture of another place, even if at first it is only on a superficial tourist level.  But you must reach for this reward, you must work for it, and you must listen to strangers.

1989 is a year that not only markedly altered my life, it was also the year that ended with the Berlin Wall coming down and the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia.  The end of Communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War were defining historic moments of the beginnings of my adulthood, including my first teaching job, when I taught English to children who had fled the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Of course, in 1989 as I watched these events unfold with my jaw on the floor of my Tucson apartment, I had no idea that many years in the future my family would be having dinner with a family who had lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain.  I had no idea that we would be discussing Ronald Reagan, freedom, and the hoops one must jump through to get a new washing machine in a Communist state.

Here’s what I learned:  families are the same regardless.  People have the same hopes and dreams and love for their children.  Parents in a socialist republic, and an Eastern bloc state, or here in the USA, love their children and their neighbor’s children.  They want the next generation to have opportunities they lacked and to exercise their rights and to leave the planet better.  And it’s the same for black families.  And Muslim families.  And gay families.  And any combination of the above.  But it can be difficult to recognize unless we have an anchor to which we can attach our acknowledgement of what unites us.  That anchor is a relationship with someone.  One person at a time.  I am amazed and deeply touched by the attachment I’ve formed with our Czech family, in spite of our inability to converse directly without the translation skills of their daughter, who is very precious to us.  We feel blessed to have had the opportunity to share with them our town and our nation’s independence and freedom, and to have a renewed interest and appreciation for such after seeing them through their eyes.

The day after our Czech family departed, my daughters and I had the opportunity to visit a nearby ranch.  We’d been invited by a dear friend but had not previously met the host.  Regardless, we were welcomed warmly, and treated to unique and fun opportunities, like his private zip line, low ropes course, and feeding hummingbirds by hand.  I had never met this man, but he treated us like old friends and made us feel so welcome – like, I hope, our Czech family felt with us.

This past week, the Dalai Lama said, “I consider we are all the same as human beings, mentally, emotionally, and physically.  In order to ensure a more peaceful world and a healthier environment we sometimes point the finger at others, saying they should do this or that.  If one individual becomes more compassionate, it will influence others and so we will change the world.”

We have had a tough go of events these past many weeks here in the US specifically, and in the world at large.  There has been too much violence.  Too many senseless deaths.  Too little compassion.  Too many valleys dividing us and too few anchors in our common ground.  We are better than our political divide.  Better than our racial divide and better than our religious divide.  And it might take generations to come closer together.  But we have traveled a long road since the year of my birth, 1968, which was also a year of terrible violence and division.  But 1968 was also the year that gave us the Civil Rights Act, Special Olympics, the first Medal of Honor awarded to a black Marine, the admission of women to Yale University, the Beatle’s White Album, the computer mouse, and René Cassin receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which, you’ll recall, found inspiration in the document that was instrumental in the French Revolution.

What if our politicians extended a hand across the aisle?  What if we took the time to know not only our neighbor’s children, but also the children of someone different from us?  What if we embody compassion (sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it)?  As the Dalai Lama said, it begins with individuals.  It begins with us – not them – us.  It begins with an open heart, a willingness to listen without judgment, without politics, and without fear.

Walls: reflecting on Tiananmen, Paris, Berlin, and the power of words

Twenty-five years ago, I embarked on my first big independent movement, traveling to another continent for study-abroad, just as a pro-democracy movement was being crushed in China.  When I left the United States on May 31^st, 1989, I’d been intrigued by the protests and demonstrations going on in Beijing and elsewhere in China.  As I arrived in London for a few days prior to my participation in a summer program in Paris, all eyes were on Tiananmen Square and the impending crackdown on the protestors.  I was perplexed, though, that all the news in London was focused on a city called Peking.  I gradually realized that Peking was the British Imperialist name for Beijing.  It was the first of many realizations that summer on the naming of things, as well as the similarities that bridge our gaps and the differences that divide us. 

By the time I reached Paris, on June 3, the Chinese military was destroying the democracy movement without mercy.  When I first saw the iconic photograph of the lone man standing defiantly before the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, it was on the front page of a French newspaper at a kiosk near my Métro stop in southern Paris.  The headlines and news reports were largely unintelligible to me on my first days in Paris.  My French was not yet proficient and I felt so removed, not only from my home in Arizona, but from these fellow college students half a world away in China.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as isolated as I did those early days as I wondered what was happening to them and their dreams.  It seemed so unjust that just as I was fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams that theirs were being mowed down.

What is difficult for me to remain cognizant of is that back then, in 1989, the Soviet Union still existed and Europe was still divided.  My arrival in Paris was only two years after Ronald Reagan’s famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”  After our program in Paris was done, I traveled for a while in Italy and West Germany with a friend.  We briefly considered a trip to Berlin, but the idea of traveling through East Germany – what we’d been brought up to believe was enemy territory – terrified us.  We opted for the biergartens of München instead.

Today, this is a small regret of mine.  I could have gone to Berlin and seen the Wall – I would have arrived just months before the Wall came down and Germany was reunited, but of course I did not know that at the time.  The Wall is a relic which now exists only in small pieces, scattered across the globe.  I happened upon a slab from the Berlin Wall in the underground Montréal RÉSO in 2011, on display between a handbag shop and a café.  How ironic, I thought, that this barrier against capitalism was encased in museum glass in that most capitalist of places, a North American shopping mall.  Seeing an artifact of history on display is a far cry from experiencing what life was like for the everyday people who lived it, though. 

As I reflect upon the courage of those students in 1989 Beijing, there’s nothing funny or ironic.  Those protestors who survived would be my age or older today.  What repercussions did they and their families suffer?  This week I came across an essay by Da Chen, who grew up in China during the 1970s.  In his essay, about the book that changed his life, he described how no reading material was available in his village unless written by Mao Zedong himself.  He and his friends were so hungry for books that when a pay lending library opened up in the village, he and his friends stole recyclables – what we Americans consider garbage –  to resell in order to have money.  The library patrons would pay approximately one penny to sit in the library and read what they could.  The next day they’d have to pay again to continue to read.  The book he couldn’t get enough of was The Count of Monte Cristo, and in fact, he and his friends spent most of their time in the library secretly copying books by hand so they could share them with each other later.  After a brief existence, the library mysteriously went up in flames, its owner barricaded inside.  The owner managed to escape but was arrested for the crime of loaning books.  After reading this essay, I couldn’t look at my piles of books, so casually stacked, so easily discarded.  Da Chen’s story brought me back to Tiananmen and also to the contrast of my life, now and then, to the brave souls there. 

They were so like me in some ways, hungry for the same rights I figured I deserved:  to travel, to study, to read, to gather with like-minded people.  I took some of these for granted, and gave the others no second thought.  How many days out of the year do I still take them for granted?  When I look back with some degree of regret on the road not taken to Berlin – because I was scared – I wonder where their courage came from.  The courage to stand in front of a line of tanks and not waver.  The courage to carry the wounded in rickshaws to hospitals while under gunfire.  The courage to care more about something as intangible as liberty than their own personal safety.  I can only wonder how tightly woven are hunger and courage, how many light-years away they are from comfort and apathy, what happens when courage is extinguished as it was so forcefully in 1989, and what form it might take when it returns.