Hi,
I hope this note finds you all well.
It's been a long time since I've written. I just realized that our moribund spring term has already begun. I imagine there is great debate. Or at least I hope there is. For what it's worth, the argument that students slack off during spring term is yet another W&L myth propagated by a few but apparently believed by many. Students who care, care. Students who don't, don't. Alternative classes, Frisbees, and alcohol in the sun as opposed to basements do little to affect those natural dispositions. That's my piece.
These were interesting months for an American to spend in Europe. As expected, I encountered my share of hyper-enlightened cigarette intellectuals, a strange breed of exhibitionist who, looking more for a public stroke to their self-righteousness than an honest conversation, fingered America as the source of everything bad and un-artistic in the world. Then again, I met others who possessed the refreshing and surprisingly rare ability to talk earnestly, without resorting to inflammatory satire and stereotypes.
But whatever the hyphenated positions the developed world's streets and 24-hour news channels witnessed these past months - anti-Saddam, anti-war; anti-globalization, anti-war; save the whales, anti war; support our troops, pro-war; anti-pissing off the superpower, pro-war - a simple, binding reality ran below all our bobbing signs, painted chests, and megaphone clamor. As Americans and Europeans, we were protesting and debating a long, long way from the problems so galvanizing and infuriating us. Save the Balkans and the relatively few directly affected by terrorism, we live safe, secure, and stable lives in a different world. That first one.
Perhaps that's the greatest difference I've noticed between 'developed' and 'developing' nations this year - the presence or absence of general stability and security. Argentina, hoping it has finally hit bottom of its worst economic collapse in history, can at least find solace in having made it 20 years dictator-free. India may have a chance at a prosperous future, but the present still finds them mired in poverty, frequent terrorists attacks, and warhead rattling with Pakistan. And then there's Africa, where I'm headed to next. Besides the AIDS epidemic, an ongoing war in the Congo has already killed millions directly and indirectly, mostly civilians. No need to speculate why CNN hasn't gorged us with live coverage or created animations of the weaponry involved (machetes and machine guns). Euphemisms aside, the developed world's hawks and doves just aren't interested. It's not (directly) our fault, not our troops, not our problem. At least not yet.
All this while European nations grapple with unemployment, immigration woes, traffic problems, crime, and fishing rights disputes. No shocking or awing here, just plain old ordinary first-world issues, floating well above the raw violence, poverty, and turbulence below. No wonder so many feel compelled to turn their reforming eyes abroad. That's where the real battles still beckon, the real adventures - fighting oppression, sparking revolutions, freeing peoples. Perhaps there remains a little maintenance and mopping up to do at home, but surely some one else will take care of it. There's a whole world yet to save. That third one.
Yet the chasm between developed and developing nations is not as deep as it initially appears. The West need not look east (middle or otherwise) or south to find regions where words like 'freedom' and 'equality' still have meaning, where they haven't been frozen and forgotten in monuments or gutted by sophistication and cynicism. Indeed, Europe (and America, for that matter) may learn valuable lessons from its own backyard.
I spent most of my time in Europe living and working in Poland. Perhaps Poland can't be considered 'European' quite yet, but its well on its way. Blocking France's snubbing of their membership to the EU because of their 'bad behavior' (supporting the Americans), Poland stands among nine other nations joining the club in 2004.
Yet much of Poland does not yet appear European, on the surface and far below. Despite its abundance of narrow, coble-stone streets, charming public squares, and postcardgenic architecture, there's no hiding its past. The reds may have all but faded into history, but a heavy gray lingers behind: an abundance of bare, carbon copy blocks of concrete, still serving as apartment and office buildings, remain in Poland's cities and towns as reminders of the heavy-handed, austere equality that once occupied the nation. Musing over the gratuitous grimness of communist construction, I once asked Marta, my translator, why equality had to be so ugly: 'Couldn't everything just be equally nice and pretty?' I asked a bit sarcastically. 'Give people something they want,' she responded rather bitterly, 'and they'll want more and more of it. Give them shit, and they won't.' A keen observation.
But Poland refused to stand for it, and, in an almost absurdly repetitive deja vu, Poles found themselves once again struggling for self-determination and freedom. And they won it, igniting a chain reaction that eventually helped bring down the Berlin Wall. Only heartened and purified by their history of occupation and oppression ('The harder you push a Pole,' the adage goes, 'the higher he will rise'), Poland once again demonstrated that individuals cannot and will not be crushed, processed, and pressed into an ideology. At least for long.
Poles have felt their freedom for a while now. Many have been born and raised never knowing what it's like to stand in line for hours to buy bread or underwear; they have not had to carry internal passports that identify their family members, employment, and movements within their own country; they have not had to bite their tongues or bury their thoughts between lines in underground newspapers. The iron-curtain gates once strictly regulating individuals' behavior have now swung open to an inundation of mostly uninhibited choice: what to think, what to read, what party to vote for, what to buy, what to worship. Poland, in other words, has joined the free world.
Yet the nation holds a deeper lesson about freedom than the trite, albeit perpetually forgotten, parable that humans don't like being oppressed by foreign or domestic powers. Freedom in Poland, as in the rest of the world, is not merely the absence of oppression or interference in individuals' lives. It is also the presence of opportunity.
One of my first interviews was with a guy named George, a 45 year-old entrepreneur who sold used, tattered books in a snow-covered Warsaw park. Exhaling into his hands and shuffling his feet to keep warm, he smiled as my translator and I approached. Somehow he knew I wasn't a local: 'Where are you from?' he blurted amicably. Surprised to hear English (I soon found out he picked up it working in a hotel - a job he lost), I replied I was from America. 'America!' his eyes lit up, 'that's a great country!' George agreed to the interview, and I proceeded to ask him my standard questions. 'Look', he responded, inviting me to sweep the gray, urban scene with my eyes, 'we're all poor in Poland. We're used to it.' I asked if his life had improved since the end of communism. He paused to think, but came to a quick decision: 'Back then, I wasn't poor. I had everything I needed: a job, a decent apartment, enough money. Everything. But now look at me,' he said, pulling his hands out of his armpits to indicate the stacks of books, 'I'm barely getting by.' He paused again. 'But you know what? I may not have been poor back then, but someone was always looking over my shoulder; someone was always watching me. You could never do what you wanted.' He stopped, looked at me intently, and smiled. 'I may be poor now, but at least I'm free.'
Score one for the capitalists. Yet the most telling part of George, I later learned, wasn't his love for freedom despite his poverty, or his remarkably sanguine and persevering disposition. It was his story's singularity. Out of all the interviews I did with Poland's poor, George was the only individual who identified an improvement in his life since the fall of communism. And he did so with the faint smell of vodka on his breath.
Poland remains a relatively poor nation, but it hardly resembles countries usually associated with the condition. I saw no slums, no festering heaps of filth, no flies buzzing around pleading looks and landing on swollen, malnourished bellies. Nothing assaulted my senses. The 'Save The Children' ads, in other words, would have a much easier time time twisting your heart to sponsor little Vijay Chandrasekar than little Michal Kowalski.
Even so, Poland's poverty is not invisible, and you don't need to look hard to find it. Indeed, the heaviest gray of the 'real Poland,' as many referred to it, hangs suspended in the nation's depressed industrial cities and rural former state farm areas. These regions' often grossly inefficient and mismanaged factories and fields once spitted, tilled, and churned out guaranteed jobs and pay for the masses. Most are silent now, closed and abandoned in the whirlwind conversion to the free market. Corroding smokestacks, shells of dilapidated warehouses, gutted broken-windowed plants, and rusted, overturned farm machines in brittle, pale-yellow grass still surround the concrete neighborhoods that once housed workers, but now hold the unemployed. Many of these places look like ghost towns that the people never left.
I gained access to these communities with the help of an organization named 'Polish Humanitarian Action', a NGO that has developed extensive programs, from free school lunches to re-education for the unemployed, throughout Poland and beyond. Initially, I found them justifiably wary in granting permission to speak with their clients. As I've discovered this year, poverty often attracts financially secure individuals who, perhaps hungry for purpose or a good story to their name, seek to 'speak for the voiceless' but only end up packaging and hawking the 'poor man's plight'. (Often they're journalists. I've tried to ensure they're not Watson fellows as well.) The NGO agreed only after I explained that I sought to give their clients an opportunity to speak for themselves, and had no intention of sensationalizing their stories. With their help, my translator and I soon started community visits and, to our surprise, found lines of the NGO's clients waiting to share their experiences.
I have been out of my league this entire year. I accepted long ago that my project is awkward and unnatural, at least superficially. Giving those living and experiencing often severe hardship an opportunity to speak provides them something helpful, but it's hard to identify exactly what. For the most part, I listen to people very different from me tell stories I have nothing in common with. I often feel sympathy, but I must stretch my imagination. I never commiserate, and even compassion often seems an inappropriate indulgence given the circumstances. I know I cannot provide much if any assistance beyond a sincere yet untrained ear. I have accepted that fact, turning my incapacity into resolve and obligation: I will employ what I learn to improve what I can later.
Yet there was something slightly different about interviewing the unemployed Poles. Since they didn't show the outward signs of poverty I was accustomed to seeing in India and, to some extent, Argentina, I became more sensitive to subtle characteristics, especially their eyes. Most looked beaten; many were vacant, others soft with vulnerability and fear. Some had traces of a sneer they used to cast at their condition but no longer had the strength to hold. I remember one woman, Inna, a Ukrainian immigrant, had very bright, even hopeful eyes. But the energy was forced and unstable. It seemed she told herself to have bright eyes. Aside from their worn and faded clothes, that was the only way I could detect they were poor. And for some reason, I found witnessing the effects of hardship in this form - in eyes than rather on bodies or in surroundings - more difficult, perhaps because that's where dignity makes its last stand.
Each individual ended up telling a similar story: prolonged unemployment with no prospect of a better future had frozen them in a tenuous holding pattern, where making ends meet, including feeding their children adequately, stood as each day's, week's, and year's unrelenting challenge. Even the slightest change to their budget - a sick child, a broken window, new shoes - could, and often did, upset the knifeblade balance. They showed little regard for their own future, and often had low expectations for the quality of their children's. Some expressed shallow hope that EU membership would act as some kind of elixir, but most shrugged it off.
The government, they all noted, provided little reprieve. Many had not worked long enough to receive sufficient pensions, and the government's 'pro-family' benefits often added up to less than ten dollars a month. Yet most did not stress the lack of benefits or money as their primary concern. They emphasized the lack of work. They all used to have reliable employment and they wanted it back. Despite the pervasive, contempt-feeding belief that the poor categorically delight in shirking work and living off others, I have consistently seen otherwise. In my experience, people across countries and cultures all view meaningful labor as a requisite for dignity and self-respect. Even if we hate our jobs, we deeply value working.
Perhaps that's why each interviewee ultimately stated with conviction and without shame that life was better during communism. Many longed for it to return. Communism didn't give them much, they all admitted, but it always provided enough: stable employment, a stable paycheck, and the prospect of a reasonably stable future (even if, true to the communist work ethic, they sat around a good part of the day). In theory and practice, the ideology no doubt suppressed these individuals with a low, iron ceiling preventing self-propelled movement upward. But it also provided a secure floor beneath. It provided a certain degree of stability, and from the stability grew a certain kind of freedom that they along with many other Poles no longer enjoy: the freedom to live without the sustained, suffocating stress of just barely keeping afloat. 'Before that goddamned democracy,' seethed one woman, 'we all lived better, not just me.'
I refuse to romanticize communism. The individuals I interviewed naturally do not offer a complete picture of Poland. Many Poles have found or harvested opportunities from the transition and passed their successes on to their children. Most look to their future as a part of the European community with great enthusiasm and expectations. And as many financially secure individuals explained to me, 'most of the present-day poor were those who didn't care if they couldn't read a particular book, or speak their mind, or leave the country, or start their own business, or build their own house. They were content living off the state, and they still want to do it now.'
There's probably some truth to that. Surely, some of current poor didn't care much about freedom then and they probably don't care much about it now. Some were probably complaisant, if not rather lazy, and remain so. A few probably would prefer to live off the state if given the opportunity. There's nothing new about a certain proportion of people, poor or not, who seek to get as much in life by doing as little as possible.
But that misses the point. The vast majority of Poland's poor do not currently have a choice between getting a stable, decent-paying job or using the 'system'. With unemployment up to 30 percent in some regions and government benefits that are anything but generous, it is inaccurate and irresponsible to blame poverty on weak appetites for self-sufficiency and advancement. Ambition, ingenuity, and bootstraps only act as decoys from what remains the essential problem - a lack of freedom, a lack of opportunity. Poland is not yet free.
Poles without doubt now possess freedom from the nightmarish state interference that once undermined their lives. That is important and beautiful. The achievement resounds from our deepest desires and reaches to our highest principles. But the struggle is not over. ' Freedom from' is not the same thing as 'freedom to'. Poland's poor may have the freedom from outside control and intrusion, but that does not mean they are free to live the lives they choose, even at a basic level. They do not enjoy the freedom to secure decent education, reliable employment, or the prospect of a reasonably stable future, all things they possessed under communism's tyranny. And now that the possibility for advancement exists, most remain far from enjoying the freedom to use or develop their talents. These freedoms have not suddenly materialized out of Poland' s relatively new vacuum of state interference. They are something Polish society as whole, not just its government, must continue to construct and maintain if its citizens are to enjoy a more complete, robust freedom.
This all approaches territory I do not wish to enter here, a theoretical and practical mire that has caught many a well-intentioned reformer: creating and distributing opportunity often means creating programs and institutions, which means more taxes, which, in turn, means less freedom for people to spend their hard-earned money as they choose. Mix that with questions of need, merit, and how economies should be managed to ensure they generate enough growth to create and sustain programs that benefit the poor, and you can power Ph.D. theses for eternity. I defer, respectfully, to academics and politicians on this one. It will take endless debates and political tinkering to achieve the perfect balance between freedom and equality that doesn't exist, yet constantly invites and sometimes permits improvement.
Ultimately, Poland will be just fine. It is making good progress, and even seems destined to emerge eventually as one of Europe's major powers. Poles know the problems and are working on solutions. But their struggle to expand opportunity, to create a more free society, is not theirs alone. There are plenty examples of EU and US business taking advantage of Poland's lingering vulnerabilities. Current EU members may help Poland advance by ensuring their new relationship is even-handed and mutually beneficial. The US can do the same. Investment need not spell exploitation.
Equally important, Poland's situation during these turbulent times provides the West a unique opportunity to take an honest look inward. As many of the developed world's eyes wander from the relative calm and stability of domestic issues to fix on the frenzy outside, we do well to remember that some worthy fights remain within our own borders. We are quick to identify injustices elsewhere, but just how free are our own societies? With regard to opportunity, Europe has done well, but can do better. (It may be surprised to learn that it has nearly the same proportion of homeless people as the United States.) America, the self-professed beacon, still has a shamefully long way to go. 'Expanding opportunity' may not evoke the same righteous enthusiasm as 'liberating the oppressed', but it should inspire the same sentiment and obligation. Those who hit the streets to demand freedom for other peoples in other nations must not forget the freedom of their own, if they sincerely va!lue the ideal's full meaning.
We should save some of that zeal for home. The first world needs some saving, too.
I wish you all the best.
Sincerely yours,
Matt