Don't Ever Give Up

1938. A Brit politician tosses a hunk of Bohemian meat at the nazi Beast in a vain attempt to satisfy the beast’s blood craving.

The sacrifice doesn’t work.

1939. The Beast and his thug minions make their move on Czechoslovakia. World War II begins. 

People in central Europe get sucked in, nation by nation, to the Hell of War. 

Even so, in the midst of extreme pain and tribulation, life goes on for most folks in the affected area, insofar as it is possible and necessary. People work; they trudge on, raise children, try to make it all work from day to day, even though shit happens and the world implodes around us and the bombs explode around them, death takes over in some places, while . . .

Life goes on. People live, people love, people strive to live from day to day, while the world falls apart around them.

1939. A two-year-old girl toddles around in her parents’ apartment in Prague, Czechoslovakia, while Europe enters its period of third reich destruction and extreme sacrilege.

1989. In the long-standing history of Czech demands for liberty, Vaclav Havel and other dissidents assembled in Wenceslaus Square to demand liberation from oppressive Soviet domination.

 2012. The 2-year-old girl who had been toddling on her parents’ floor in Prague while the Czech way of life was being blown to smithereens in 1939—that child, having grown up, served her adopted country, USA, as Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations . . .

That girl, now a mature woman, published a book about her life, a life that included memories of her home in Prague, a great city in the Czech nation that had, in days past, defeated—with a little help from me friends— the damn nazis in ’45 and then later, also, the ejection of the soviet communists during the Velvet Revolution of ’89 when nary a shot was fired. . . when Vaclav Havel and a million other brave Czechs shook off the bondage of totalitarian regimes with a bloodless, “Velvet” revolution. 

So you see, the Czechs, along with the Slovaks, the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, even the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, the Moldovans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Macedonians,  Albanians, Yugoslavians, Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, Hungarians, Slovenians, Italians, Swiss, the Spanish, not to mention the French and British, the Belgians and Dutch,. . .and of course the very Germans themselves and the Austrians, with a little help from me friends the Stars & Stripes . . .

they kicked the nazis back into their holes and the soviets back into Russia. 

And after all that, when Madeline Albright—the previously-mentioned 2-year-old of 1939 Prague— published her 2012 memoir, Prague Winter, which gives an account of all those world-shaking events, . . .

  Madeline concluded her book with these words of encouragement: 

“I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not at first . . . and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because . . . the good we seek, and the good that we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here.”

Amen, sister!

Glass half-Full