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Lack of courage. A failure of resolve. An escape from reason

Hard Times: What the aughts were about



“See, I never heard that word ‘depression’ before. They would all just say ‘hard times’ to me. They still are.” ~Roger, a 14 year old boy from Chicago quoted in Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” Hard times. Our time. Couldn’t be a more appropriate sobriquet. And it’s not just about money being hard today. Because after the money gets a bit easy, the times are still going to be hard.

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Many publications have started this year with commentaries about what the first decade of the 21st century was all about. I knew these retrospectives were coming, but what got me thinking about the times, was the front page of the International Herald Tribune on Christmas Day. It seemed to say it all in three headlines and a picture. All above the fold as they say. The four column full color picture in the middle of the front page was of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. A burly bear of a man, he is untouchable in China even when he stands up for dissidents. Untouchable because of his renown, but more so because his father was an iconic figure of the revolution. Ai was pictured arriving at a courthouse in Beijing where Liu Xiaobo, a professor and writer, was being tried for “incitement to subvert state power.” In the accompanying story in the right hand column the headline read “China puts rights activist on trial for subversion.” The subhead read “In closed proceedings, many see a discouraging milestone for free free speech.” Beneath the picture of the Chinese dissident was a four column headline. “Clumsy thieves and an icon of Nazil evil.” Dateline…Berlin. The left column of the front page – bookending the picture with the China story – was equally stark. “In shadow of minarets: Europeans’ fear of Islam.” So what was the first decade of the 21st century about? The same tyrannies and fears and hatreds as plagued most of the 20th. Hard times. What’s the prognosis? I don’t think it’s a very optimistic one. True, one could argue that each decade is incrementally better than the last. That though we may be faced with the same sicknesses, they are not as severe. And this argument has merit. But that doesn’t make the times any less hard. Life is not an exercise in relativity. Its weariness is not relieved by the contemplation of something worse. And what makes it so hard today, is that we really have all it takes to do better, to be bolder, to act bravely. But we don’t. The west does business with China. But where are today’s Jacksons and Vaniks who just thirty years ago set tough standards on human rights that the Soviet Union had to meet if it wanted to do business with the west? “Incitement to subvert state power?” We should not sit idly by while that is called a crime. The best of us fought wars in the past century to give every human being the right to oppose state power and exercise the fullness of their individuality. The theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the gates of Auschwitz brought the following reaction from Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority. “The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust.” What makes the action at Auschwitz so particularly heart-rending is that it comes against a backdrop of renewed anti-Semitism worldwide. The act itself sparks rage because it highlights what Shalev had to say – we may have learned little. Coming up to the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz we may not only have failed to instill the lessons of the Holocaust, we may actually have begun to trivialize it as just another historical footnote. Santayana’s haunting warning that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it echoes down to us through the mists of time. The Swiss referendum on banning minarets is a warning. A warning that the appeasement of Islamists by many western governments has produced a reaction of rage at all Muslims in some quarters. This kind of xenophobia can be crippling for a liberal, pluralistic society. Yet it arises out of popular frustration with government inaction on destroying the extremists. Churchill once said that an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile hoping he will eat him last. Lack of resolve against evil feeds the crocodile within even the most open society. So what were the aughts all about? They could have been about lack of courage. A failure of resolve. An escape from reason. What lessons should we learn for this decade? That we are rich enough to stand up to communist totalitarianism and control our greed for growth. That we are strong enough to instill the lessons of history’s tragedies so that the teachings of contempt shall never triumph – in Europe or in Darfur. And that we are intelligent and compassionate enough to respect practitioners of faith while opposing the tyrants of theocracy . More than easy money, heeding these old lessons will turn around the hard times of this new century.


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Beryl Wajsman -- Bio and Archives

Beryl Wajsman is President of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal editor-in-chief of The Suburban newspapers, and publisher of The Métropolitain.

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