EDITORIAL: 1980: the wheat and the chaff (12/28/80)

EDITORIAL

1980: the wheat and the chaff

It may be said that the year that is about to become memory marked, to paraphrase Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times for the Ukrainian community in the diaspora. It offered scattered nuggets of genuine hope and an avalanche of frustration.

There was promise in the fact that the United States, our adopted homeland, was finally (if belatedly) beginning to speak out on the situation in Ukraine in tones that suggested a nascent understanding rather than a weary and WASPish paternalism. At Madrid, the U.S. delegation skewered the Soviets with the names of Chornovil, Stus, Rudenko and others - names that a short while ago had little meaning outside our community. Much of the factual ammunition was supplied by a small army of Ukrainian activists and former dissidents bent on having the Ukrainian cause aired in an international forum. Their success was a major step in gaining a foothold for our struggle in the conscience of the world community.

In Denver, a group of resolute Ukrainians refused to roll over when a civic committee once again attempted to hang the albatross of collaboration on the Ukrainian nation. When a proposed memorial park for the victims of Babyn Yar not only excluded mention of the Ukrainian victims of the Nazi atrocity, but explicitly implicated Ukrainians as abetting the victimizers, the Denver UCCA Branch instigated a nationwide campaign that resulted in rectification of what would have been a gross misrepresentation of Ukrainian history. It was an isolated victory with far-reaching implications.

There were other noteworthy high points. At the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women held in Copenhagen, Ukrainian women's groups kept a high profile by staging hunger strikes and demonstrations in solidarity with Ukrainian political prisoners in the Soviet Union. In the United States, the Media Action Coalition stepped up its campaign to draw attention to media inaccuracies concerning Ukraine and Ukrainians, a campaign that picked up momentum as feedback from the Ukrainian community increased.

But for all the achievements positive steps and promising accomplishments, 1980 was also a year of crisis in our community, a year when all pretense of unity, of common cause, went out the window.

Predictably, the watershed was marked by the lamentable spectacle of the 13th UCCA Congress where all the petty "political" differences, all the self-destructive tendencies ever-present, it seems, in our community, erupted in a paroxysm of fratricidal frenzy that widened a rift in our community that may never be breeched. In the name of vague and yellowing "ideologies" that out of their historical context have absolutely no specific or practical application in our time or circumstance. Ukrainian slugged toe-to-toe with Ukrainian, thereby capping off a minatory polarization process which existed, albeit under the surface, for decades. When the smoke cleared, the biggest losers were the Ukrainian community and the Ukrainian nation.

Ukraine, her people, her freedom and the concrete means to attain it, were hardly mentioned at the 13th UCCA Congress.

If anything positive can be garnered from the rubble of the organization of organizations, it is the fact that some major problems, so often glossed over by mawkish claims of Ukrainian unity, rocketed to the surface with such glaring enormity, that they virtually beg solution. What the 13th Congress did was give our divisiveness definition and animation; it brought it out of the closet and the ghetto and, therefore, made the problem tenable. It dramatized the growing alienation of Ukrainian Americans, the problems of language, the disaffection of our young people, the persistence of old concepts in a new age and, most importantly, the frightening degree of provincialism and reflexiveness in our emigre politics. Political gamesmanship and infighting have become the raisons d'etre for many political organizations, and not, as the congress proceedings sadly attested, the survival of our community or the liberation of Ukraine.

As the year draws to a close, we suggest that all Ukrainians take a long and thoughtful look at the state of the our community and the situation in Ukraine and, as the saying goes, separate the wheat from the chaff. There are valuable lessons to be gleaned from the mixed bag that was 1980. We should look with pride on what we have attained, and realize that the virtue of calamity is that it opens the door for reassessment and redirection. The problems that became so real this year must be addressed if the community is to survive another generation.

We will not endure as a nation if our political bickering continues, if our young people are allowed to stray from community life or continue to promulgate the divisiveness of their parents, if our internal politics remain an end in itself, out of the mainstream of international developments. And we must reach a consensus, not on what Ukraine will look like if and when it is liberated, but on the tangible and explicite means of attaining that freedom. For this end, we must ensure the strength and survivability of our Ukrainian community here at home, for if it disintegrates, all hope for our nation will go with it.

Let 1981 be a year to remember for the right reasons.

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