WHY NOT? LET'S TALK: Where were you when ...? (09/17/06)

WHY NOT? LET'S TALK

by Yaro Bihun

Where were you when ...?

We were having a late, leisurely breakfast, on what was a beautiful September morning by the Chesapeake Bay. Until the phone rang, that is, and the BBC Ukrainian branch editor asked if I could go on the air, live.

Whatever for? I asked.

September 11, 2001, or just plain "9/11," has joined that small list of dates people remember as if it happened yesterday. Many of my generation also remember well where they were on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. Many Ukrainian Americans can do the same with August 24, 1991, when Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada voted for independence.

Recalling where I was and what I was doing on 9/11 and the other dates, I was struck by the realization that I could not do the same for another, similarly dramatic date remembered well by others of my generation: April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis.

Why did the murder of this civil rights icon who strove to undo non-violently the discriminatory aftereffects of slavery in this country not imbed itself in my mind like those other events? As I searched for an answer I ultimately had to change the question from "Where was I when King was shot?" to "Where was I when he was alive?" and to broaden it further to "Where were we?"

Growing up on the west side of Cleveland in the 1950s, I had little, if any, opportunity to get to know any "Negroes," as African Americans were then called. Our Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Grade School was all white, of course, as was St. Ignatius, my Jesuit-run college-preparatory high school (except for one young Jesuit prefect who directed the glee club). Needless to say, so was our Ukrainian "Ridna Shkola" Saturday school, our Plast Ukrainian scout troop and every other organization and activity that formed our lives.

All of these institutions - as well as our parents - tried and, for the most part, instilled in us the highest of moral and ethical values, and yet there was a great injustice perverting our society about which we received little, if any, guidance.

We simply lived in a different world. "We" lived on the west side of Cleveland and in Parma. "They" lived on the east side of the city, across multiple railroad tracks and the Cuyahoga River.

I was finally introduced to that other world in 1961, when just out of high school I enlisted in the U.S. Army, which was not only integrated racially but, thanks to the draft, economically and socially as well. This naive 18-year-old got his St. Paul experience after the sixth week of boot camp at Fort Knox, Ky., when those who did not mess up were rewarded with weekend passes to Louisville. I received a pass, as did my new friend from St. Louis, Mo., Bob Davis.

Dressed in our Army uniforms, we rode the bus into town. Hearing jazz coming out of a bar across the street from the bus station, I suggested we start celebrating there. Bob looked at me as if I were crazy. They won't let me in there, he said, explaining to me, as best he could, the facts of life in America. We spent the weekend drinking beer on the black side of town.

My education in racial relations continued during the rest of my three years in the service, but, to my shame, I did not pursue it further after I returned to my old environment. I did not go to Mississippi to help register blacks to vote. I didn't march to Selma, or on Washington, not even to Cleveland's Public Square to protest racial discrimination. Now I wish I had. But then, I, as well as our community in general, had other priorities.

Among the many things that received our attention and energy were protests against the imprisonment of dissident Ukrainian writers in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and, more recently, our demand that the world recognize the Soviet-made 1932-1933 Great Famine in Ukraine, or "Holodomor," as a genocide. But at the same time we did not seem to mind the imprisonment - for 24 years - of Nelson Mandela for opposing the white South African government's racist apartheid policy and, most recently, the continuing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. True, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress issued a statement, but has any recent rally at the Shevchenko monument ended with a small protest just around the corner at the Sudanese Embassy?

I wonder if, knowing about the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during World War I, did our community protest the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II? I'm not sure, but I doubt it.

Where were we? Why does our house, as we put it in Ukrainian, remain "skrayu" (out of the way).

And could we be ignoring anything else today - in the developments since 9/11?

Where are we today?

Yaro Bihun is a journalist living in Washington. His career in journalism included a brief stint with a small daily in northeastern Ohio, 10 years with the Voice of America Ukrainian Branch in 1970s followed by 15 years in the press division of the U.S. Information Agency, covering African, Near East and South Asian Affairs. He also served briefly as press attaché at U.S. Embassy in Kyiv in 1992. Since taking early retirement from the USIA, he has freelanced for the BBC Ukrainian section (1994-2001) and The Ukrainian Weekly.

This article marks the inauguration of Mr. Bihun's new column in The Weekly.

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