Discontent Over Democracy

IUSED to enjoy reading the newspaper. I would gloss over the articles, read some summaries and peruse the editorials. It was a daily, casual event that kept me abreast of the times, but didn't demand much intellectual strain.

It seems those days are gone. Now it takes me several hours just to stay on top of things, and several more to try to understand them. I'm inundated by the daily flood of headlines from Eastern Europe. 'Tis the season to be overwhelmed.

The op-ed pages mirror my unsettled feeling. On one hand, we can read warnings from academics, hard-line Cold Warriors and eternal pessimists about how the demise of polarity could take us back to a Bismarckian Europe. But much more common, at least until the dust settles, are the jubilations over the domino theory in reverse. Every-where we're reminded what an exciting time it is to be alive.

It isn't just that the shift of winds in Eastern Europe is so incredibly rapid, but so disconcertingly nebulous. The changes in Poland and Hungary are not like an election campaign, which has a definite conclusion, or an earthquake, whose scale can be precisely measured. Where we will end up, few are willing to predict.

SO I'm here, reading voraciously, with no good way to evaluate what is going on. All I can do is react emotionally. But this too has been disconcerting.

At first I was ecstatic. The pictures of kids prying chips from the Berlin Wall is not easily forgotten. "Can you believe it?" I thought, "Something is finally going right."

But then neurosis set in. I was once jubilant, but now I'm paranoid. "History is being made, so sit back and enjoy the ride," I want to think. But everybody is in such a good mood it makes me nervous. Every week I use this column to bitch about one thing or another; I'm not used to having something to cheer about. I keep expecting to find a dark cloud inside the silver lining.

Then, (and this one is worst of all) I felt remorse. Until this year, my images of Eastern Europe were of downtrodden men who toiled for The Party and ate watery cabbage soup. Face it: I was weened on the Cold War. I grew up thinking that the way it is is the way it would always be.

Now, the face of Eastern Europe is irreversibly altered, and damn it, I missed my chance to see the way it was. When my children are being tenured at Hungarian universities, I want to be able to say, "Well, when I was there in '86..."

I feel I could better appreciate the present if I had some first-hand knowledge of the past. I know it's self-centered, but try to understand my sentiments. It's just like conservative columnist George F. Will suggesting that we preserve communism in Albania "as a museum."

After feeling remorse, I was overcome by paralyzing apprehension. "It can't be this easy," I think, "Something horrible has got to happen." An Eastern European version Tiananmen Square seems unlikely, but the very fact that I couldn't think of any alternative scenario heightened the mystery.

NERUOSIS, elation, apprehention, fear, remorse--I have gone through the whole slate of emotional distress. But the one that keeps haunting me, that flashes in my mind each morning when I read the newspaper, is alienation. Here in Boston, studying in school and watching from afar, I feel left out of the very events that are defining my generation.

There they were, dancing on the wall, with their cigarettes and miniskirts. These students were spending a typical Friday night doing the atypical. I know I should be there, and frankly, I'm jealous.

I'm jealous that I can't afford to go there. I'm jealous that I don't belong there. I'm jealous that foreigners of my generation are helping to fundamentally alter their societies when I can scarcely get my peers to vote. I'm jealous that a revolution partially led by students is across the Atlantic and not here.

The temptation is to look at Eastern Europe with a smug vanity and say that democracy won. Our way is better.

Indeed, our way is better. But it isn't perfect, and we're falling behind in the race for self-improvement. The students marching in the streets of Prague should not flatter us, but humble us.