In Case You Missed It
In the avalanche of imagery that buries our daily memory of what’s happening in the world, you may have missed this picture of a Ukrainian man, crying in the great square of Kiev.
He’s in his sixties by the look of him, a working-man no doubt by the rough hands that gently hold flowers, as at a christening or funeral.
I know him.
He was here in Czechoslovakia in ’89 in the crowd on Wenseslas Square as the Iron Curtain came down---that same unmistakable look of heart-stopping wonderment that a man feels as he first sees a newborn son, bloody and dripping and squealing with life. Will he be okay? have all his fingers and toes? love me as I love him? Look again at the tear-washed face and see the bitterness and lost dreams of his six decade life tremble in the hands that hold the flowers.
The Czechs became free in ’89 and watched as freedom siphoned off their wealth to the same old power brokers over the next ten years, old commies and new mafia merely pushing different levers. But it was on…