Virgil

I don’t read the New York Times very much, but in scouring headlines this evening I came across a great op-ed from yesterday’s edition. The writer reminisces about the end of communism in Prague and the moment he and his countrymen finally came to realize that freedom was real.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/op...sler.html?_r=1

IN a stadium in Prague, 20 years ago today, a hundred thousand people, including my father and me, saw something we were not supposed to see. For decades it had been forbidden. The music, we were told, would poison our minds with filthy images. We would be infected by the West’s capitalist propaganda.

It was a cool August night in 1990; the Communist regime had officially collapsed eight months earlier, when Vaclav Havel, the longtime dissident, was elected president. And now the Rolling Stones had come to Prague.

The communist had banned all western rock music, and so the author and his father only had smuggled pieces of music from western bands, and knew of the Rolling Stones by a few songs.

Soviet soldiers had been stationed in Czechoslovakia since 1968, when their tanks brutally crushed the so-called Prague Spring. My father was 21 at that time, dreaming of freedom and listening to bootlegged copies of “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” But it would be more than two decades before he would get to see the band live. During those years, you had to tune into foreign stations to hear the Stones. Communists called the band members “rotten junkies,” and said no decent socialist citizen would listen to them.

Maybe they were and still are “rotten junkies” but damn can they play rock ’n’ roll. The thing that captivates me about the Stones is that they really do bring out the inner rebel we all have. And I guess to someone having lived under communist oppression, it must have felt so much more poignant.

That night in August, waiting for the Rolling Stones to come on stage, we felt like rebels. The concert was held in the same stadium where the Communist government used to hold rallies and organize parades. My classmates and I had spent endless hours in that stadium, marching in formations that, seen from the stands above, were supposed to symbolize health, joy and the discipline of the masses.

There are those who claim that freedom is an illusion. Oh contraire.

Suddenly the lights dimmed. Drums started to pound, and the screens turned on as if by magic. “Oh my God, it is really happening,” whispered a woman standing close to me. She was expressing something more than just the thrill of a concert. She was saying that the Communists were truly gone. That we were finally free to do as we pleased.

Goodness gracious, that brings tears to my eyes. I’ve taken many positions on issues in my life. The one I’m most proud, and probably shaped my adult being more than any other, was my stance against communism before the Berlin Wall fell. My contributions may have been infinitesimal, but I was a passionate cold warrior.

Two and a half hours later, when the concert was over, people were crying and hugging one another. My father cried and hugged me. From that point on, no one would tell him how he should think, how he should feel. He had seen the Rolling Stones with his own eyes. And it felt so good.

If you don’t believe freedom means anything, ask those who were denied it.

This is not that concert. But enjoy it. It’s freedom, baby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhiQ0...eature=related