PERSPECTIVES: (12/17/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Onward to the 21st century

In two weeks, it will be 2001. According to my son, that's when the 21st century really begins. There was no year 0, he patiently explains, so we started our calendar with AD 1. The next millennium, therefore, begins on January 1, 2001. I look at him and wonder. "Where has the time gone? When did he get to be so smart?"

Ten years ago as we got ready for New Year's Day 1991, my wife and I were enjoying the new baby we had just brought home. He didn't do much then: he ate, messed his diapers, kicked his feet and cooed happily or cried to get our attention. Now he's playing Beethoven on the piano, reading thick books about wizards, and running a hectic schedule that straddles his American and Ukrainian worlds. What a difference between him now and what he was a decade ago, yet if you were to look closely any two days running from the last 10 years, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in him from day to day.

Is it any different with the events that flow inexorably from one day to the next until suddenly there's a narrative, a story that ends up in the history books our children bring home from school? "In the 1960s and 1970s," a textbook might say, "the Baby Boom Generation came of age, while America underwent enormous social changes precipitated by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War." There might be a photograph of the Woodstock Music Festival or Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

You look in the assignment book: "Answer four questions and be ready for a test." So you help your child with his homework and later, before you go to sleep, reflect on the fact that he was studying your youth, only it took him 15 minutes to cover the entire decade you and your generation spent in high school and college. Day by day, season after season, from kindergarten to your first job and beyond, you experienced a hundred thousand impressions a day, until now you've reached this point where the cars you once drove are in museums and the baseball cards you threw away are wrapped in cellophane and priced as expensive antiques.

Besides school, our son dances with the Kashtan Ukrainian Dance Ensemble in Cleveland. I look at the other kids at practice: they look just like their parents did when we all went to Ukrainian studies school so long ago. What's equally eerie, though, is to look at the kids I used to play with, now grown up and just like me, bringing their children to dance practice. They look just like their parents did way back when. Now, like my wife and me, they're working to perpetuate the same institutions that helped us, by and large, grow up to be good people, good Americans. The community endures.

That's not to say that things haven't changed. At the Ridna Shkola Saturday School, the quality of the Ukrainian language is much poorer than it was when I was a kid. As for the dancing, I don't remember us being as good as the kids are now.

What's really different, though, is the community's relationship to Ukraine. Growing up, I remember Ukraine as a kind of mythical paradise that had been usurped by evil forces. The community's mission in America was to redeem the homeland we kids had never seen. Our calendar revolved around commemorations: in January, it was the 1918 independence day; March was Shevchenko; Captive Nations in July; Halloween was always disrupted by the November 1 anniversary of Western Ukraine's independence. We marched, we sang, we went to liturgy, we listened to speeches, we recited poems - to no avail, it seemed. Back then, Ukraine was never a factor in world events. No matter how many letters to the editor we wrote, newspapers and magazines still identified the Soviet Union with Russia. If Ukraine were mentioned at all, it was always with the article "the," proceeding it, just like the Midwest, the Yukon or the Panhandle.

As imperceptibly as winter gives way to spring, Ukraine's irrelevance evolved into a public mention here and there, usually in the context of human rights, the dissident movement and the Helsinki Accords. Then in 1986, Ukraine literally exploded onto the world stage when the Chornobyl disaster had "experts" scrambling for maps and political flow charts.

Now Ukraine is a player in the global arena: the World Bank sends missions to Kyiv, NATO conducts maneuvers on the Black Sea coast and Ukrainian sports teams compete internationally. Where once, the only contact with Ukraine came when the mailman delivered blue-colored envelopes with postage stamps marked "CCCP," it's now a long distance call, or e-mail if you prefer. In this country, a steady stream of immigrants eager to get green cards replenishes our community with Saturday School teachers and choir directors. Invariably, the mainstream press has some mention about Ukraine - mostly for things we're not proud of: corruption, exploitation of women, political in-fighting. So when did all this happen? All in the last 10 years - in the time it took our son to go from infant to fifth grader.

Ukraine remains central for us and we let our elected officials know that - only support for Ukraine is now a much more ambiguous question than it was during the Cold War. Funding to help Ukraine's military work with NATO? Of course. Funding for cultural exchanges? Certainly. Funding to prop up the collective farm system? Certainly not. Most of us are inclined to leave policy details to others and trust them to make the right decisions and choose the best people, so long as they support Ukraine's independence and development toward democracy and prosperity.

Today the most urgent mission for the Ukrainian community in America, as I see it, is to replenish our institutions. Week by week, season after season, what we ought to do is focus our energies on dance ensembles like Kashtan, theater groups like New York's Yara, on the youth organizations like Plast and SUM, the Church, the Ukrainian National Association. We ought to request and then support university courses in Ukrainian history and culture, expand the number and variety of Internet webpages devoted to Ukraine, write novels, buy books.

During this Christmas season and time of renewal, it's good to acknowledge with awe that, indeed, the Lord rewards hard work and answers prayers - Ukraine is finally independent. Now there's a new set of challenges and no time to waste. For our family and many of our friends, our community provides a wonderful framework for engaging children, keeping them busy and giving them something to identify with. It's no different for us, really, than it is for Americans of Irish, Jewish, African American or any other background or identity. We just happen to be who we are.

So, Happy New Year and have fun working in the community in the 21st century. If we all do that, in a decade we'll look back, be amazed at the changes we'll see and wonder when it all happened.

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