How can humans who can do such great things also be so reprehensible?

I was struck by a conversation I had with my friendly UPS driver the other day. I told him that I had just gotten back from a two week vacation overseas, and he told me he just did the same. He had spent a week in Poland and a week in Belarus visiting family.

I’ve spent most of my life not knowing anything about Belarus. Then, a couple of years ago I was struck by an article that our writer Pio submitted.

He wrote, back in October 2020, that we should take notice of what was going on in Belarus, which at that time in the middle of a contested presidential election. Lukashenko, then and still their dictator leader with strong ties to Russia, was accused of fixing the election in his favor. There was a  nationwide protest that was violently squashed.

Pio presciently wrote: ” Indeed, if we don’t look at the protests with an ideological view, we will see how the whole scenario is a geopolitical matter in a country which is a crossroads in the exact middle of two political blocks: the Russian Federation and the European Union.”

In the end, Lukashenko prevailed and his opponent had to flee to Lithuania.

Fast forward a couple of years and Lukashenko’s friend Vladimir Putin leads Russia in a violent invasion of their neighbor Ukraine.

I asked Derek, the UPS guy, what it was like in Belarus. He said it was fine, things were like normal. Then I asked what I was really interested in knowing, what were people saying about the Ukraine. He told me that nobody talks about that, at least in public. Why? Because nobody wants to go to jail, or worse.

What he was telling me was what it was like to live in a country with limited freedoms. Living my whole life here, I only knew about that through my parents, who spent the first parts of their lives in Eastern Europe.

It’s different when your UPS driver tells you about this today. It makes it real.

What that brings home to me is how important it is to live in a country with what the French Revolutionaries called “The Universal Rights of Man,” published in 1789, and which was echoed in our own Bill of Rights.

One of the things I like to say is that no matter how bad things get here in this country, at least so far nobody from any government agency has asked me to submit this paper for government approval before I print it. I went to Brazil in the late 1970’s when there was a military dictatorship. Every publication had to be read by government censors before publication. Here, if I write something stupid, it’s you guys that take me to task, not the military police.

So when I hear from Derek about the censorship of speech that invades everybody’s life in a place that people in his family still lives, it brings home the fact that over 225 years since the Universal Rights of Man were written, these rights are still not available to many people who otherwise live just like us. They have cars, internet, refrigerators and all the rest.

Of course it’s not just Belarus. In Russia you get fifteen years in jail for voicing any opinion at all not in line with Putin. China’s got over a billion people without these kinds of rights. One can only imagine what it’s like in North Korea.

Here in New York, our rights seem relatively safe. Everybody’s seeking justice, whether social or otherwise. Except for what are called ‘illegal’ aliens, there don’t seem to be any political prisoners in our jails. This is not to say that there are not people in our jails unjustly–but these are generally due to the inequalities of an untamed capitalist system, not because of politics.

However, even here you can’t get too smug. You are starting to see distressing stories in the news about women in states such as Idaho who are losing their basic rights. This is from a recent article in the Guardian:

“A bill that sailed through the state’s house of representatives and advanced in the state senate last week would make it a crime to transport a minor for the purposes of obtaining an abortion without the consent of her parents. The bill creates a new felony crime, so-called “abortion trafficking”, that’s punishable by two to five years in prison.

The bill would criminalize an aunt or grandmother who drives a teenage girl over the border for a legal abortion in Oregon. It would make a felon of the school friend who lends her money for a bus ticket, or the older sister who takes her to the post office to pick up a package with secretly mailed pills. The legislation also contains a provision giving the Idaho attorney general the ability to override the jurisdiction of local prosecutors on this charge – so if a local DA doesn’t want to prosecute those who help scared and desperate teenagers, the state can enforce its sadism anyway.”

Then look what happened last month in Tennessee after yet another mass shooting. This from the Associated Press:

“In an extraordinary act of political retaliation, Tennessee Republicans on Thursday expelled two Democratic lawmakers from the state Legislature for their role in a protest calling for more gun control in the aftermath of a deadly school shooting in Nashville. A third Democrat was narrowly spared by a one-vote margin.

The split votes drew accusations of racism, with lawmakers ousting Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who are both Black, while Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is white, survived the vote on her expulsion. Republican leadership denied that race was a factor, however.

The visitors’ gallery exploded in screams and boos following the final vote. After sitting quietly for hours and hushing anyone who cried out during the proceedings, people broke into chants of “Shame!” and “Fascists!”

Banishment is a move the chamber has used only a handful times since the Civil War. Most state legislatures have the power to expel members, but it is generally reserved as a punishment for lawmakers accused of serious misconduct, not used as a weapon against political opponents.”

In 1964, I actually wrote on a bedsheet and paraded around Shea Stadium as a participant in the first NY Mets Banner Day celebration. Back in those days, every Sunday was a doubleheader, so they got to do things like that between games.

It’s not like I expected to win the best bedsheet, and I forget what I wrote, but I do remember what won, although I didn’t quite understand it.

“Extremism in Defense
of the Mets
is No Vice.”

I didn’t know, but just a few months before Barry Goldwater had said something similar as he accepted the Republican nomination for president. Just instead of the Mets, it was Liberty.

Talking to Derek reminded me how important it is to be diligent about protecting our freedoms. Back in the 1960’s a small movement grew huge as people realized that Vietnam was not a just war. We finally quit it, and the world survived.

I’m not sure what I would do if faced with the choice of censorship or jail, but it’s something to think about.

George Fiala

Founder and editor of the Red Hook Star-Revue. George is also a musician and one-time progressive rock disk jockey, in York, Pennsylvania, also birthplace of Mrs. Don Imus.