The soon-to-close winter Olympics have been fun to watch, though CPAC diverted my attention for a few days. I saw today that a Polish female skier won that nation’s first cross-country gold. It got me thinking……..
When I was a kid, it was fairly common for the grown-ups, especially when speaking to emigre in-laws, to refer to Europe as "the Old Country." This thinking was pervasive enough that it was not uncommon to see restaurants named "Old Europe." I think there was even a small chain with this name with a couple places in West L.A. I recall the great pea soup….
My grandfather was an emigre to California. He was born in Grodno, Poland, two centuries ago, when it was under Russian control. (It still is, though it has been tossed back-and-forth like Alsace-Lorraine). A Russian speaking, Russian citizen of ethnic Polish blood, and a Catholic, he moved to the Siberian maritime province when he was a teenager with his family, at a time in Russia when making that move was akin to "Go West, Young Man," in the U.S. He went to college at a Jesuit school in Shanghai, China. Then WWI came, and because he could drive a car, he received an immediate officer commission in the Russian Imperial Army and was shipped back west out to St. Petersburg. There he stayed, teaching kulaks to drive cars. When the Czar abdicated, it was natural for him to stick with the armed forces, which were loyal to the legitimate Kerensky government of the "February," 1918 revolution. He was stationed as a driver at the Winter Palace, the seat of the Kerensky government, when the Bolsheviks stormed it in October, 1918. He used his weapons, and was shot at that night, but made it out, somehow got a pass for the trans-Siberian railroad, and made it back home to Vladivostok. He was with the white Russian community that held out against the Communists to 1923 during the Russian civil war. But the handwriting was on the wall. They were among the lucky ones that got out, and made it to America. His college degree and officer position got him a job as a janitor at the Berkeley Bank of America, cleaning floors and polishing brass, from which he retired with a Timex gold-trim watch in the 1960s.
How times have changed. My grandfather epitomized the term "old country" to me. But this Olympics has nothing of that "old country" about it. The democratization of Europe has generated a new generation of young people who seem not stuck in the old thinking, and not defined by it, be it politics, prejudice, ignorance, wars, or irrational disdain for fellow mankind. We learn at this winter Olympics that Lindsey Vaugh, our great downhill racer, winters with one of her German competitors. When the Russians win a gold, we don’t hear a political message in the playing of their old national anthem, approved by Stalin himself, glorifying Communism. There is no thought at all of the scene of the 1936 Summer Olympics, when Adolph Hitler refused to acknowledge the accomplishment of America’s Jesse Owens.
And the rise of Canadian nationalism, fueled by a few medals, and of absolutely no threat to the United States, has been very fun to watch. Conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper, with Liberal British Columbian Premier Gordon Campbell, and the NHL great Wayne Gretzky, all standing together in the stands belting out the beautiful "O Canada, We Stand On Guard For Thee," has been wonderful to see.
I am not saying i am ready to become an ambassador for UNICEF. But what I am saying is that the progress of democratization has been a good thing, and that the tensions in the world that do exist are real, but somehow more localized and less pervasive than they were when I was a kid. It takes something like the Olympics to stimulate such positive thoughts, and that was probably what the original sponsors had in mind.