University Wire
07-14-2004
(The Pitt News) (U-WIRE) PITTSBURGH -- This is the fourth time I have returned to Poland since leaving the country in 1989. Things have changed a lot since then. They've changed a lot since my last visit here, four years ago. Now, everyone has cell phones. The youth dress, for all intents and purposes, like American youth -- except more modestly. They chat on the Internet, many on laptops. Their lives resemble ours in every way, except that they're less wealthy and decadent.
I am presently visiting my grandparents in Warsaw. The radical differences between their generation and that of today's youth in Poland are noteworthy.
My grandparents' generation has a deep sense of history. They lived through World War II, and if they lived in Warsaw, they lived through their city being razed multiple times during the course of a half-decade.
The categories of national identity from the past live on anachronistically in their language. Russians are not Russians, they are those [damn] Bolsheviks. Communists are not Communists, they are merely traitors to the national cause.
The history of this generation has not only left its imprints in their language, it has determined how its members conceive of themselves. They are Poles because they were willing to give their lives to maintain their status as Poles.
A perfect example is a friend of my grandparents who visits every couple of years, whom I recently saw for the second time. We know him simply as "the general." I have never seen him wearing anything except his beret and his old military uniform, adorned with at least a dozen medals, which he earned fighting in World War II. On a walk, he recounted the spot where he was wounded in the neighboring block during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. He knows the history of virtually every battle Polish forces have ever fought. He, as a man, and his identity were born in violent struggle.
I immediately notice the sharp contrast between the general and the young Poles surrounding me in this Internet cafe. They are not creatures born of a violent history, but fashioned out of images, in the struggle involving not conquering armies but competing advertising campaigns. You could put them in an Abercrombie catalog. They are Poles because they have been born here, by sheer chance. Their identity would mean nothing to them if they didn't have a Polish passport and didn't speak Polish.
I can't imagine anything like World War II ever happening again, not with today's generation. Who would fight such a war when one's existence is shaped more by the interplay of commercial culture than nationalism or patriotism?
I abhor violence, but this still has had an unsettling effect on me. War may not be possible, but one's life is also not worth fighting or dying for. Today, we act passionately to make ourselves seem unique, to try to fashion an identity, atomized among the crowds of society, rather than fighting because of an identity, because of something we believe in, because of something that actually means something.
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