Entry from Budapest

Panna, a Budapest bartender.

I’m sitting in a building where my grandfather’s friends were killed. Or where their families hid while they died. Or where someone hid during one war that ravaged the city.

I’m also standing on a second-floor patio in an old Jewish section of Budapest with a man named Stern who – without correction – denies the pot-marked balcony at his eco-friendly hostel was once hit by bullets. Neil Young is playing, my girlfriend won’t be surprised, and I spent all night talking about the dichotomy of good and evil with a man whose ancestors were slaughtered at Auschwitz – in a county where half the population still turns away when gyspsys are killed, so he says. Twenty-percent openly hate the jews, he says.

And I’m still sitting in a building with bullet holes and no heat with a bar in the backyard.

I’m drinking rose because I recognized the brand’s name matched that of a Hungarian soccer player. Even Stern says he’ll leave the county as soon as he can. Not to India, like his dread-locked business partners though. He doesn’t specify where.

Stern smiles more than anyone else I’ve met here, other that the three Montenegrins that left Budapest a day early because the people they met were only interested in wearing a generalized frown and “drinking coffee and talking” all night. We all talk about Hemingway and America and Hungary and Serbia and Capa. We let each other find one another – over a joint, and a tin-can beer – because there is freedom in the single hour we meet. Our rules do not apply, our society has no say in what is said, and we are honest.

Late at night, after the local bartenders have taken a few rounds themselves, the people seem more alive. They laugh around foosball tables, wearing Tommy Hilfiger white and red patches and thick-rimmed glasses and Native American prints.

“No one’s ever asked about it,” they say. “I don’t feel Communism at all.”

But five minutes into the city, there’s no denying the smell of cracked walls and old men in front of liquor stores at ten in the morning. But perhaps that’s the point – it doesn’t smell of communism, it smells of a group of people who – for however many years – have struggled live a dignified life.

For the oldest generations, the only understanding of life is their parent’s suffering, and their parent’s parent’s suffering. And their grandparent’s parent’s suffering. And sometimes they’ve fought against it, for five years or five weeks, and apparently, Stern tells me, that’s what makes them Hungarian.

When I was a child I once wrote a report about my Grandparent’s country. I read a book that told me Hungarians had experienced 1000 years of victory in defeat – that such an experience was fundamentally Hungarian. And in some ways, its understandably preferable to live with a dull dagger in your back, than to find yourself one day without a head in a palace.

Here, no one sits in the National castle anymore.

On Egypt: Freedom, Democracy, and America

“It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices but we can try to be so, in uniting Europe at last in forgetting our quarrels, in correcting our own errors, in increasing our creativeness and our solidarity.  We have faith that there is on the march in the world, parallel with the forces of oppression and death which are darkening our history, a force of conviction and life, an immense movement of emancipation, which is culture and which is born of freedom to create and of freedom to work.” The Blood of the Hungarians, Albert Camus, Paris, 1957.

Today in Egypt, the power of protest, and of the people, has reigned supreme over a politician whose party refused to live up to its own duties. Under the veil of democracy, President Mursi’s government has – time and time again – taken steps against the Egyptian people’s wishes; claiming any protest against his post is a revolt against the very status of democracy in that country.

But, democracy is not a perfect system. Nor is it one whose citizens should be persuaded – by its mere existence – that revolt outside of the ballot is detrimental to its continued existence. The essence of liberty dictates that a free government should have both a lust, and a responsibility to expose its own flaws so that its citizens may demand change.

When a government – be it American or Armenian – refuses to accept its own imperfections, democracy does not command its people to pour their rage into a ballot box.

An infallible desire to maintain the ‘legitimacy’ of a single democratic process is the last argument of a government that has declared all other processes invalid out of fear for its own safety. In the west, we are shocked at government ignorance of major financial crimes, but scoff at those who marched on Wall Street demanding answers. We are shocked that our government has evaded the 5^th amendment through carefully worded ‘collections of data,’ but condemn the man who induced that shock as a traitor.

We do this, essentially, because our leaders ask us to. Because, if they’re still promising us a vote, shouldn’t that be enough?

We hold dearly to these points-of-view while taking liberty for granted. As a nation, we have allowed ourselves to hold – as common sense – a nearly unerring belief in the method by which our democratic leadership ascended to power. We are certain a government which preaches the century old sentiment of “by the people, for the people,” could never cross the line into tyranny; that time and a vote are good enough impetus of change.

Yet, it is apparent on a daily basis that democracy is no longer a system by which people control their own fate. It is a perpetuated motif that allows those in power to use the illusion of freedom to quiet, and subtly adjust the will of the masses. It is a religion that hides behind the verbiage of its doctrine to justify – but withdraw from examination – its inherent flaws and weaknesses.

And yet, every election day, we all line up for communion, ready to accept – but not control – the choices of our reverent democracy.

However, the wounds of freedom are still fresh enough on the Egyptian people’s bodies, that they refuse to stand idle while democratic doctrine is used to protect false promises, and betrayed trust.

Democracy is not simply a word to these people. It is not to be defined by a November election, and a State of the Union address. Democracy, to them, is the liberty to take action without being silenced or taken for granted. It is the ability for absolute truth to be revered, and for the people to access it freely.

It may be easy laugh at a Tea Party protest, or a feminist rally, but only because our “common-sense” system has made us fear what is different, rather than acknowledge what is the same. For many, it is impossible differentiate between the protest and its views because we are subtly asked not delve too closely into the situation at hand. When a protest and its views are intertwined as a conglomerate of problems, it is easy to attack any massive urge for change. When the two are separated, one finds that is possible to be proud of a protest, while dissenting from its views.

It is not time to stand up against other citizens whose beliefs (while contrary to our own) are equally ignored by our leaders. We must realize that neither democrat, nor republican is content with the designs of the American government. As politicians are wont to remind us, we must move above these differences. However we must move beyond them in correcting a vicious institutional problem which is blind to the demand of all citizens – not only to those who share your own wishes. Only then can we fully understand how the power of true debate can create a country that is striving towards a better, freer, tomorrow.