[EAS]Building Democracy

[pjk]

Subject:   Building Democracy

   ... Out of What?

<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/06/brooks.htm>

That is the title of an article by David Brooks in the Atlantic
Monthly that particularly resonated with me, partly because of my
origins in WWII Europe. Yes, I know this mailing isn't about
technology. Neither are a lot of the most deeply vexing problems of
the day. The article is short, and worth reading. It begins

> In the early 1990s, while covering the decline and fall of the
> Soviet Union, I observed a curious phenomenon. The inside of every
> apartment I visited was tidy and clean. But every building's
> vestibule, hallways, and stairs were filthy and rancid. The floors
> looked as if they'd never been mopped; lights were burned out; the
> air reeked of urine. I started asking people why they didn't get
> together to clean up the hallways. After all, I'd say, there are
> four or five families living on your floor. A half hour's shared
> work and it would be done.
> 
> They'd give various reasons: The neighbor on this side is an
> alcoholic. The neighbor on that side we never see. But the real
> reason was that after seven decades of living under totalitarianism,
> they didn't know whom they could trust; they didn't know if their
> neighbors belonged to the secret police. By that time citizens were
> no longer being sent off in large numbers to the gulags for minor or
> manufactured crimes, but the bonds of normal society had been
> destroyed. People's souls had been damaged by decades of terror and
> mass murder.


Oh Prophet, speak to us of the freedom that arises when tyranny is destroyed.  --PJK