Courage is required
“Hope has two beautiful daughters their names are anger and
courage;
Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not
remain
the way they are.” (Augustine, Summa Theologica)
In the world of greed for power
there is little space left for morality. Robert Fogel, University of Chicago
economic historian and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for economics, said on
the day his award was announced, "intense beam of morality... can change
history."[1] To start and nurture
that “beam of morality” requires courage, knowledge of history, sharing
stories, and patience in pursuing the truth.
Every family in the Soviet Union
lost at least one member in the World War II. Intelligent and well-educated
Germans became obsessed Hitler-phrenics and followed their leader, who promised
them Europe and Asia, as their dominion in exchange of loyalty. One
man-dictatorship created an army of soulless human machines that experimented
on children and women, burnt people in concentration camps, and exterminated
village after village, and town after town. The insanity of one man was
not resisted and it cost Europe millions of lives. It cost Russia 20
million lives. The scariest part of that time in our history was
that Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin–two communist dictators–brutally
murdered another 20 million Russians in Gulags.
So many people in the former Soviet Union have been hurt and
humiliated unjustly. Many died without being rehabilitated. Many are
still keeping family secrets, afraid of sharing them, though
everything is supposed to be long forgotten. One day, the KGB
archives in Ekaterinburg, Russia were opened and the dismayed residents learned that just
near the town gates there was a nameless burial ground. Thousands of guiltless
people had been secretly shot, the dead and those left to die were pushed into
ditches and covered with earth. Relatives who had been patiently looking
for their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters lost in prisons, went hopefully
to this place. Thus a new "cemetery" was
born. People began to nail the photos and names of their relatives
to the huge trunks of the trees that had grown in the area since the
night of massacre. All tablets with names had the same date of
death. When my father took me there one afternoon, the spirit of violence shook
me, and I felt horror hovering over the burial ground.
Vladimir Lenin[2], the Father of the Soviet
System, came up with a postulate, required for change: “Change (revolution) is
possible when the top (the powerful) cannot rule in
the old way, and the mob (the powerless) cannot live in
the old way.” Modern Russians reinvented the old postulate: “When the top
cannot rule in the new way, and the mob doesn’t want to live in the new way.”
Unfortunately, I observed similar attitude among Americans.
Oppressed people are fatalistic and passive. They do not want to
get involved. They don't understand that they are oppressed. Courage
doesn't come until we get angry at how things are. But anger is not popular. We
all want to be nice.
Hope has two beautiful daughters.... And hope dies last.
17 October 1993, 1, 4.
Lenin), leader of Bolsheviks, a politician, one of the Russian
dictators - http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSlenin.htm
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