This story was originally published by Daily Montanan:
URL: https://dailymontanan.com
This story has not been altered or edited.
(C) Daily Montanan. Licensed for re-distribution through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
------------



The fragile Ukrainian democracy is proof of the miracle of democracy – Daily Montanan

['More From Author', 'March', 'Darrell Ehrlick']

Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00

As the family lore goes, when my great-great grandmother was really mad, the greatest epithet she could muster was, “damn Bolsheviks.”

That’s understandable. Both sides of my family left Russia and lands not far from Ukraine because of the totalitarian regimes. What happened after they left is also a matter of family lore because after Comrade Josef Stalin, nothing was ever heard from them again.

So they traded the Volga for the Yellowstone, and the dry land wheat farming they had developed in rugged Russian territory, they developed here. Good lord, hoeing sugar beets seems like hard work, but it literally beat the alternative, which was annihilation or banishment to Siberia.

And so history is repeating itself as people flee in search of peace and freedom.

My great-grandparents could never forget the homeland they left, although they were the first ones to wave an American flag because they understood in a way that I hopefully will never have to what that freedom meant – life itself.

They couldn’t forget what happened; we can’t either.

Another memory I have is watching the Berlin Wall fall and communism seeming to collapse overnight (of course, it wasn’t that quick). We watched a revolution of freedom spread, and almost as quickly it seems that we have seen a rise in authoritarianism and autocracy.

But what Ukraine is demonstrating is the resilience of democracy – how a free world comes together to rally and support a struggling – some may say – doomed country. It seems to me for all the horrible demonstrations of strongmen, including those in North Korea, China and Russia – the democracy that America has helped to sow has taken a tenacious yet tenuous root in places like Ukraine.

While democracy may not have taken to places like Russia, which traded one form of government for another while never losing the autocrat and the oligarchs, in places like Ukraine and many formerly Soviet-controlled puppet countries, they’ve cast off the shackles of despotism.

As I was growing up around people whose accents sounded a lot like Putin’s, I didn’t grasp until later that the thick eastern European cadence, not so unlike Count Dracula’s, was supposed to be frightening, menacing. To me, they just sounded like all the other old people in my family, although they sometimes used strange smelling herbs and canned weird things, like fish.

However, I have never forgotten that those same people who talked with a funny accent or made strange food were the same people who dug deeply in purses and pockets to find a quarter for me and my sister. And they were like the Russian people now – worthy of compassion. Those people who are risking their lives by protesting in the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg are equally brave, and we cannot mistake the corrupt Russian government for the good Russian people.

And so I offer this truth – there will always be more that unites us than divides. It’s just that commonalities aren’t often as interesting as that which separates us.

Ukraine is trying to teach us something, and if we’re not careful we’ll miss it: That this fragile peace we’ve enjoyed for generations takes nurturing and cannot be taken for granted. We must redouble our efforts to find common ground. We must practice freedom, tolerance and compromise, not just say them.

And we should be proud that our leaders – in both political parties – have shown restraint by not marching headlong into a place, provoking World War III and maybe even worse, a nuclear showdown. Leaders – with few exceptions – have upped their games as they’ve tried to countermand Russia’s action by enforcing every punishment possible short of outright arms. We’re crippling the Russian banking system, and making them a world pariah. We’re showing through a coalition of unity that the old way of doing business, which is to say war, may not be as easy as Putin calculated.

With all the bad news we’ve endured since COVID-19, it’s important to see the things – the big things – that are truly working even in the midst of such turmoil, chaos and uncertainty.

[END]

[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2022/03/05/the-fragile-ukrainian-democracy-is-proof-of-the-miracle-of-democracy/

Content is licensed through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/