Political Analysis from Grandpa Volodya
Lesya and I just got a letter from Grandpa Volodya. Grandpa is 88 years old. He is a retired teacher and schoolmaster who lives in a small village called Mala Strushka in Khmelnitsky oblast. His wife, Lesya’s dear old Grandma, died just a couple years ago.
Grandma had always been for Yushchenko, right from the first she started hearing about him and his work in the NBU. But Grandpa was not an opposition supporter. In the late 90s, the family even had to buy them a small second television so that Grandma could watch her small local opposition station and Grandpa could watch his 1+1.
By 2002, the year before she died, Grandma had won Grandpa over. Even more, Lesya’s mom gave them a copy of Yuliya Tymoshenko’s “Vecherny Visti” newspaper once, and the grandparents liked it so much they got a subscription. Grandpa still receives the newspaper.
Here is the political portion of Grandpa’s letter:
“…It’s good that elections are over, everything is settled, and that tomorrow after the inauguration Yushchenko will become the legitimate President of Ukraine. I understand that it will be far from easy to establish order in the country, and he will have to change all governmental structures. Even so, there will still be a large group of “unreliables” in government, but I think, perhaps, that Yushchenko’s true friends will help him—the friends who stuck with him till the end.[of the Oct and Nov elections] May the Almighty help him in this…”
kisses and hugs,
Grandpa Volodya
Dan McMinn
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Reader Comments (4)
My theory is that the "exaggerated expectations" line in the newspapers never actually existed in the people. Someone, somewhere, heard that people were excited, and spun a story with a question: "But are they too excited" and from there on out everybody makes the point.
People are excited, but this may be the first political activism of any kind in Ukraine that hasn't gotten the protesters killed. It also may be because everyone knew there would be a protest, but nobody knew how big. Or because it actually worked, and Kuchma is out. When a man hijacks your country for a decade, you tend to start thinking of him as an immovable object. When you move the immovable, you start getting pretty upbeat.
Finally, people aren't looking forward, I don't believe, when they get happy. When I talked with people in the tents about the future, they usually shrugged off the question. People wanted the Kuchma government out, that is the success they celebrated.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006205
It's nice to know that such ideals as freedom, democracy and human rights are realistic not 'too high' expectations. Rock on regime change.
And everyone here notices. If the US had backed down from its criticism of this election because of Iraq, few Ukrainians would have talked about it immediately. Why? Because they would already have made the cynical assumption that the US was never interested in democracy. They wouldn't need to talk about it until later, when the US tried to promote freedom again.
If you have principles, know that any exceptions you make will have a 10x greater effect on people than actions consistent with that principle.