Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution kept me busy in 1989.  There was suddenly so much to do.  The developments of each day, each hour, brought new surprises and concerns -- and more work as I struggled to keep up with the pace of events.  It was one of the most exciting times of my life, and no one knew what was going to happen next, though I certainly tried as hard as anyone else to guess how it would end.

Of course, the outcome was less of a personal matter for me than it was for the fifteen million Czechs and Slovaks who were wrapped up in the velvetiness of it all.  Meanwhile, I was among just the many hundreds in the U.S. intelligence community busily vacuuming up all the fuzzy bits we could suck in from over the horizon in Germany.

As everyone -- well, almost everyone -- has been remembering these past weeks, it all turned out pretty well, at least at the beginning when freedom (then still a term with an unblemished reputation) was the most tangible outcome.  I lost my job, but I got another one.  Unlike with real estate and cars, there's always a big market out there for intelligence products of one kind or another.

Eventually, I came to Czechoslovakia in the physical sense.  Back then, in 1990, there was a stark contrast when you crossed the border from Bavaria into the Western Bohemian town of Rozvadov.  You could smell the difference in the acrid pall of soft brown coal smoke hanging everywhere.  It was the first sign that freedom was going to be a messy business.

By the time the Velvet Revolution gave way to the Velvet Divorce and the Czech-Slovak breakup, I was already living in Prague.  When the split happened at the stroke of 1993's first midnight, the underwhelming nonchalance in Prague made the historic moment almost a non-event.  Perhaps Czechs would have been more excited if they had known how things were soon going to turn out in Slovakia.

Throughout the 1990s, Václav Havel's presence as former dissident cum philosopher president always reminded me that I had missed the truly electric atmosphere of those heady fall days of '89, making me feel even more like an outsider.  Not only didn't I know what it was like to live under communism, but I also hadn't been there to see what happened when everyone suddenly stopped doing so.

Last month's 20th anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution found me back in Prague more than eight years after I left and travelled off to live and work in places like Haiti and Iraq.  Those experiences and everything we came to know in the world of 9/11 and beyond made the horizon of that "New World Order" I once thought I could see from Germany seem ridiculously far away.

After nearly a decade away, Prague has changed significantly.  For one thing, there are many more adults walking the streets today who, like me, not only lack personal experience under the old regime, but also weren't around in a meaningful way for The Revolution.  (Here I'm including everyone under the age of 30, i.e., anyone who wasn't at least 10 years old in 1989.)

The other big change -- and it had already been well underway for quite some time when I left in 2001 -- is that America and Americans hold a place of much less prominence in the minds of young people than we occupied in the imagination of their elders, who saw us both as an ideal and a tempting forbidden fruit.  These days you can get your Amerika fix without even knowing it simply by buying an iPod to help you tune out the rest of the world.  Call it consumerism, or call it democracy:  sometimes it's hard to tell the difference when your inner voice isn't on your playlist.

But just when I thought that even my status as an irrelevant foreigner had itself become irrelevant, young Czechs who have launched something they call a "Democracy Checkup" got my attention.  These are mostly college students born right around 1989 who are themselves trying to define their role in a country whose most familiar moment is unknown to them personally.  They are strangers in a familiar land, so we have a little bit in common.

While attending a few of the events they sponsored and listening to what they had to say, I realized that idealized notions of America and, from a cynical point of view, what some would more or less affectionately call quaint (dare I say hopeful?) expectations about the true power and potential of vigorously exercised citizenship in a democracy are alive and well in Bohemia, and even somewhat inspired by an American case that is nonetheless in many ways as misunderstood here as it is in our own country.

One might wonder how long it will take these students to become resignedly, rather than merely bitterly, disillusioned, perhaps not unlike many among the generation of dissidents and protestors whose torch they would take up in their quest to shine their own light in the dimmer corners of a society whose dimensions have expanded, yet whose inner civic space they and others (including Václav Havel, in fact) feel has not yet grown in every positive direction needed to fill the resulting emptiness.

Or could their peers have something else in mind?  As one young man put it at a debate I observed, "Maybe people aren't taking an active role in trying to change things because they're happy with their lives the way they are."  Now that sounds much more like the self-interested and insular model of democracy I've always known and voted for, even though it's superficially disrupted by fits of discontent accompanied by slogans and speeches (albeit necessarily without the lighting of torches).

On November 17, the anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution, my wife -- who does remember singing on Wenceslas Square 20 years ago -- and I joined thousands of others who recreated the student march through Prague to Národní třída, the boulevard where the fateful clash with security forces occurred in 1989.  It was my second vicariously experienced Velvet Revolution, though one whose virtual reality was much more three-dimensionally satisfying than the previous version.

Before the parade started, there were the inevitable proclamations, and the last words to the crowd came from a young man who reminded everyone that, no matter how flawed Czechs' democratic society might seem to them, there are many lands where people live much worse.  Though he may have been thinking of North Korea or Cuba, my own experiences elsewhere tell me that he's onto something that's worth remembering, though without becoming overly complacent (nor, indeed, too cocksure) about the implications:  Things can always be better in a democracy; but they are always likely to be a lot worse in places where poverty and violence are more abundant than even imperfect liberty.

TAGS: Czech Republic, Prague, Velvet Revolution

Prague is the latest stop on Darian Arky's long and winding road from Europe to the Caribbean, across North America, to the Middle East, and back to Europe again. More a traveler than a tourist, he's also less a writer than a blogger -- though no less inclined to suffer from the kind of nervous breakdowns that occasionally make for good reading.

Related Posts When We Fell In Love - John Dermot Woods by  JASON CHAMBERS, JONATHAN EVISON, DENNIS HARITOU, & JASON RICE

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 8:22 pm and is filed under News & Politics, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.