When Sand Gets in Your Eyes

Blinded by the mundane, we risk losing everything

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Freedom and democracy, like many of mankind's more notable achievements, are victims of their own success. Those of us in America and other modern democracies who have never lived without the benefits of a free society have little if any idea what it would be like to live in a country that didn't have them. Over time, we tend to confuse our failure to fulfill national ideals like equality and justice with some inherent flaw in the ideals themselves. Immigrants, many of whom have experienced destitution and political persecution, are often baffled by America's lack of appreciation for its own liberty and prosperity. While we bemoan the lack of progress on social justice and gripe about the price of gas, millions risk their lives every year to come here because, notwithstanding our faulty justice system, violent crime, cost of living and other myriad problems, life here is indescribably better than the conditions that so much of the world's population is forced to endure.

Once, at the end of a long and snowy winter, a self-appointed delegation of staff members where I worked complained to the powers that be about the parking lot. Sand had been put down repeatedly on the icy pavement, and now, when the wind blew, it got in people's eyes. The boss looked at them with disbelief and then laughed them out of the office. "What these people need," he said, "is a bus trip to the Bronx." This kind of story does not exactly endear Americans to the rest of the world's peoples. Can you imagine migrants who passed through the Darien Gap, on a trek of thousands of miles to escape crushing poverty and rampant violence in their home country, complaining about sand in the parking lot?

To be fair, even a good life is filled with inconveniences, great and small. The fact that other people have worse problems does not justify failing to deal with our own lesser annoyances. After all, the definition of a better life is having to put up with fewer hardships, and we are all seeking a better life in one way or another. But how about a little perspective about what actually constitutes a hardship? There is clearly something about the human mind that makes it hard to remember that things can always be much, much worse, if not for ourselves then certainly for many of those around us.

There are stories in the news fairly often, for example, about Americans detained abroad and compelled to experience the hospitality of prisons in Iran, North Korea, Russia and other such destinations. We realize, at least in the abstract, that these are not free countries, and that their governments arrest apparently innocent foreigners simply to use them as bargaining chips to get their own compatriots released from foreign prisons. We know that the prisoners whose release our enemies are seeking tend to be convicted weapons smugglers, drug lords, war criminals, hired assassins, or all of the above. When the American pawns are finally set free, we are genuinely happy for them and their families. But somehow, if we even take a moment to acknowledge that we are lucky to live here and not there, the thought is fleeting and not, shall we say, transformative. In a few minutes, we will return to complaining about all and sundry: traffic, high interest rates, bad cell phone service, sand in the parking lot.

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Even when confronted with stories that are genuinely horrifying, we pause only briefly to sympathize with the victims and count our own blessings. Consider Syria, at least for a few minutes.

The public jubilation in Syria in recent weeks over the fall of a homicidal dictator resembles the public reaction to the fall of tyrants throughout history. A dictatorship always seems impregnable until the moment it collapses, after which it seems inconceivable that it could have lasted as long as it did or been as powerful as it appeared only days earlier. After the fall, despots all turn out to be made not of steel, as they themselves like to boast, but of glass: sharp but brittle. The rot at the center of the regime is not always visible from the outside, but, like a thick tree with a decaying core, once it starts to topple it goes down fast and hard.

The end of Syria's horrific civil conflict — or a least a definitive pause — has allowed millions to emerge from hiding. People gathered by the thousands in public places not only to celebrate their liberation and try to locate the missing, but merely to be together, something universally forbidden by repressive governments. There was an overpowering need to be released after years of forced isolation, a hunger for harmony after so much blood-letting, and enormous excitement over the possibility of a better future. In such circumstances, these emotions and their expression cannot be suppressed.

But to what degree can we truly identify with the suffering of millions of Syrians during the half century of rule by the sadistic Assad dynasty? Even in a country where unthinkable atrocities have taken place, there is often a desire among many to move on, to forget. It is not only the guilty who wish to turn the page. We have a powerful will to keep going, which often means burying our most painful memories and jettisoning our yearning for justice. And if the worst victims of such unremitting horror can feel this way, is it any wonder that the gaze of the rest of the world will quickly turn away and return to its own mundane concerns?

Of course, the Syrians are a long way from the point of forgetting. One has to know something in order to forget it, and the scope and scale of the country's suffering are only just beginning to come to light. But have no doubt that there will come a day, perhaps sooner than anyone can imagine, when torturers and their victims will live side by side in the same neighborhoods, when the craving for normalcy will overwhelm even the strongest hunger for vengeance. This is how it is now in Rwanda, Bosnia and dozens other places that have emerged from darkness. The perpetrators live among us, unpunished and unbowed.

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The disbelief and relief over Syria's sudden turn of events is reminiscent of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe 35 years ago this past November, which similarly was the culmination of a rapid surge of events. It would be difficult to overstate how deeply we in the West were affected by the scenes that unfolded on our television screens over those fateful weeks: sections of the Berlin Wall knocked over by protesters; East Germans, Czechs and Hungarians pouring over their suddenly unguarded borders into the West; repressive governments falling one after another, their leaders attempting to flee into exile, or, as in Ceauşescu's Romania, hunted down and executed for their crimes. Fearsome barriers that cost thousands their lives over the years were turned into nothing more than harmless lines on a map.

Visiting Prague in 1988, only a year or so earlier, we had little expectation that the palpably oppressive atmosphere would lift any time soon. Evidence of deprivation was everywhere: barren shop windows, inedible hotel food, colorless clothing, restored facades of historic buildings surrounded by visibly decaying neighborhoods. Life in the East must have been even worse than it appeared if people risked their lives trying to escape into the West. A question haunted us as we walked the dismal streets: Why don't we do something? Why must these people live this way? The answer was only too obvious: we didn't intervene because of Soviet tanks and nuclear missiles, more or less the same reason why Ukraine is now fighting Russia alone.

They yearned to breathe free: a few of the Berlin Wall's victims, 1961-1989

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 was therefore as astonishing as it was inspiring. Those who did not live through those times, nor the previous decades of tense nuclear standoff between the Communist East and Capitalist West, can scarcely comprehend the inexpressible relief that people felt on both sides of the Iron Curtain when the wall finally fell. We in the West obviously did not endure the same sacrifices as the newly freed Ossis but we certainly shared their happiness and their hope. It didn't seem quite possible that forty years of nerve-wracking conflict could just dissipate so spontaneously and completely. And yet we found ourselves, almost overnight, in a new era.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was depicted dramatically in The Palace, a German television series made a few years ago and recently broadcast on PBS. It is the story of identical twin girls who were separated in infancy and grew up on opposite sides of the wall. They were unaware of each other's existence until they met as adults, entirely by chance, shortly before the wall came down. The unadulterated joy over the demise of the East German police state was tempered by the challenges that lay ahead, and is represented by deep differences between the sisters despite their profound happiness over finding one another. These challenges still bedevil German society even after a largely successful process of unification. Germany still finds it difficult to reconcile the conflicting cultures and attitudes of East and West, and, partly in response to these enduring divisions, extremist political movements are rising in popularity.

Needless to say, the Russian menace remains a constant drag on the westward inclination of the Soviet Union's former subject peoples. We may have won the Cold War but many Russians never got the memo. The severe economic hardship they suffered following Communism's demise left many Russians suspicious of capitalism and democracy. (More about this here.) Of course, they never experienced real capitalism and democracy in the way, say, Poland the Baltic states have. The former East Germans, for all of their problems, are now part of a highly advanced, prosperous country with genuine electoral choices. By contrast, Russians (and Belorussians and Central Asians) have had to make do with kleptocracy and rigged elections. They have rejected Western notions of freedom without ever knowing what it truly mean to be free, and they remain as vulnerable as ever to the kind of demagoguery and lies that gave them centuries of Tsarist and then Communist misrule.

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A dramatic turn of desirable events does not banish evil from the world, and just as Russia has regressed into an imperialist monarchy, Syria may again fall into factionalism and civil conflict. The cautionary tale of Libya looms large, and Syrians are no doubt anxious not to repeat the mistakes that led to the calamity that followed the deposing of Libya's own sadistic dictator. The elation of the current moment will not eliminate the many challenges that existed before and that were exacerbated by the dire circumstances that preceded this moment. Forgive them their momentary delirium, but have no doubt that it is indeed momentary.

An outbreak of human decency, however deeply and sincerely felt, cannot permanently suppress the darker tendencies that drive people apart and make a mockery of a common cause. Our own history after 9/11 offers a stark warning about how quickly solidarity can give way to division. And our challenges were minuscule compared to those of today's Syria and post-Communist Eastern Europe. Ukrainians look heroic now in the way they have stood up to Russian aggression, but they were not exactly on a glide path to freedom and democracy before the invasion. They too had their mass street protests and eruptions of democratic sentiment, only to be brought down to earth by insuperable internal problems and rapacious neighbors. The evening may bring ineluctable happiness, but there is always a reckoning in the morning.

One may well wonder what it takes, then, for a nation to sustain its appreciation for its newfound freedom. How does it mature into a stable, functioning polity without losing its memory of its tragic past? Must a people be constantly challenged, threatened, bullied and terrorized to avoid taking their liberties for granted? Some theories of history suggest exactly that: only societies that are forced to overcome great difficulties have any hope of moving forward and holding their ground against their adversaries. Complacency destroys not only freedom, but progress of any kind.

Just as we have become cavalier about vaccines and antibiotics because no one can remember what life was like without them (i.e., when one in three children who were ever born died before the age of five), so we cannot truly imagine a life without our freedoms because we have never had to do without them. The world is replete with examples of countries where the gift of liberty is no more than a dream, where persecution and the fear of arbitrary arrest are daily realities; but somehow the struggles and aspirations of others don't impart any valuable lessons to us. If we cannot preserve the dream that we have realized, then we are doomed to live their nightmare. And at that point, mere sand in our eyes would be an unqualified blessing.