Václav Klaus Institute
This Friday, April 12, my father would have been 100 years old. He died very young in 1963, he was 39 years old. I'm only 5 and remember very little of him. Yet all my life I think of him, asking myself what he might have said, what he would have thought, what advice he would have given me.
He was born into a difficult time. His generation's adolescence was marked by war, his adulthood by communism. The family business was nationalized, tenants were forced into our house, Dad left college - he didn't want to wait until he was fired as the son of a tradesman.
He's only been through the tough '50s. Not yet the thaw of the sixties, he did not live to see the hopes of 1968, nor the Soviet occupation and the gloomy normalisation. His entire generation was denied freedom. They were too young before the war, and the fall of communism found those who lived to see it only as pensioners.
Life without my father was hard, I was raised by my mother and grandmother. I remember how she saved all her life, how she made up for it, how she managed everything. All my life I felt a commitment to her and to my deceased father, a sense of duty, and I drew strength from them in my studies and in my work. The older I get, the more I think of them, remember them, and guess what they might say nowadays.
The family used to be the foundation for past generations. They would certainly disagree with the attacks on it, with the tendencies that weaken and disintegrate it, with the enormous divorce rate that the state supports and facilitates in every possible way. Being a single mother was and is extremely difficult. I have experienced it. The state should be doing everything it can to support the complete family, not help break it up.
My parents' generation, despite the hardships of war and communism, received a good education. They were brought up to be patriotic, they read and they had insight. My father's library has been with me all my life. They would have been frustrated by today's school chaos. They wouldn't understand how half-literate graduates could leave school without having read a single book in their entire lives. They would not believe that even in the daily press, grammatical errors are common in articles and that even journalists make mistakes. They would find it hard to accept the lack of motivation of today's young generation and their entitlement mentality.
They would certainly not be able to understand that today we are once again being ruled by people for whom private property means nothing, who are once again preaching nonsensical slogans in the spirit of the infamous "We will command the wind, the rain", who are once again looking at the housing problem with the optics and logic of the national committees of the 1950s. They would not understand that the freedom that their generation was denied for half a century is now of no interest to anyone, that we are once again entering a system that invokes censorship, and that we are approaching a situation where only what is expressly permitted will not be banned. They would not believe how we could have lost and lost everything so quickly again.
My parents' generation lived through the war, experienced the real existential threat to the nation and the euphoria of liberation. They could not understand the war-mongering rantings of today's politicians, who lack real experience of the limits and horrors of war. One of the few memories I have of my father is of him sitting in the kitchen at the time of the Caribbean crisis, listening intently to the news on the radio. Back then, ordinary people and political decision makers knew what was at stake, knew the risks they were taking. They understood that the great powers had to come to an agreement because the danger to the world was too great. Today we are being persuaded that the only acceptable solution is war to the end, because you cannot negotiate with the enemy. Yet the risks today are incommensurable with those of 60 years ago. Tonight alone, hundreds of Iranian missiles flew into Israel. Who will fail first, who will make that fatal mistake? My parents, if they were alive today, would be worried about us.
I think we let them down. They were our role models and tried to teach us to always keep our sanity. We couldn't explain today's officially promulgated gender and transgender nonsense to them, with dozens of genders they would have rushed us.
Perhaps we should remember our parents more often, look at old photographs, read yellowed letters. Maybe we can regain our ground, our sanity, our lost ability to distinguish the essential from the irrelevant. And those lucky enough to have their parents still alive could and should make more time for them.
I don't have parents anymore, unfortunately. And so, at least on the day of my father's 100th birthday, I stood at the cemetery by his grave with my three children, his grandchildren, whom he unfortunately did not know, and then we all went to the pub in honour of my grandfather. It was a lovely family occasion.
Jiří Weigl, 15. 4. 2024
https://www.institutvk.cz/clanky/2691.html
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