The parents were worse. Column Maciej Wierzyński

There is unanimity in one respect: the world is in crisis. Tomorrow is uncertain and it is not known what awaits us. We agree on this matter. You have to be a careless crazy to say something different loudly, for example, that the world has not experienced such troubles and somehow left them.

Gałczyński even wrote a poem about it, popularized in the cabaret of Olga Lipińska. I don't remember who sang that everything was already there. I am a similar opinion and I expressed it. Times are sad and stupid, but there is nothing to be hysterical. It was worse and just that it was worse, and our parents managed, survived, I'm going to write. However, I have the impression that we have got used to it too easily that tomorrow is better than yesterday. It happens, but this condition does not last forever. In addition, it rarely improves at the same time. The first example from the shore: Poland and Ukraine. Things are not bad with us, and our neighbors the wind of history is still blowing.

Dozens of years ago I talked to Jan Karski on this topic. This wise man, when I was in his eyes in fashionable pessimism, calmly cited several arguments against, and began with the indisputable fact in favor of the thesis that he was better than it was: the average person lives longer than before. I listened politely, but I thought: the old professor saw so much horrors in his life that he would not impress him. In this situation, I started looking in books and this way I came across some incorrect optimists. There were not many of them, so you will let you quote several of their observations. For example, as Rafał Malczewski wrote in a booklet on Zakopane, entitled “The navel of the world”.

Malczewski tells in those written in Canada During World War II, memories, sleeping at the occasion of anecdotes, like a small, killed by Podhalańska Wioszczyna – nomen omen Zakopane – she made the title of “Summer capital of Poland”. A country, which is economically backward, but not without higher aspirations. Malczewski writes what this one looked like – God's fire – the capital and what the mood was on the eve of World War I, i.e. just before one of the many disasters, which – until that time – the world survived. “Nobody thought – we read in the” navel of the world ” – that in a few years one of the Poroniński vacationers (it is about Lenin, who even made a monument there – note MW) will blow tsarism (…) with the help of Dzerzhinsk. New homelands were born. Amateurs grabbed the rule.” Doesn't it resemble the present time?

Today, one of the most powerful powers in history in our eyes loses strength and meaning. What's worse, according to the widespread opinion, the unpredictable amateur ruled by this power, from which you can expect the strangest nonsense. I say to it: the future of humanity had to be similar in 1918 and so the great writers saw that I would mention Tomasz Mann and the “magic mountain”. The change hung in the air, but the wide audience did not accept her. To this day there are large: why? For convenience? With stupidity? Was the reason the reckless belief that it would be somehow?

Let's stick to examples and times closer to us. Summer 1939, in Poland. At that time, the change hung in the air. Hacha, as an installed by Hitler, the president has already ruled in Czechoslovakia, and Poles, if you believe in the cited memories well today, they relieved their legs in the Baltic. This shows that the trauma of our parents did not go, i.e. they did not crack for any reason. Although they were worse, according to all data, than we do now.

That is: do not hysterize the Pole. And I just wanted to call.

Other columns of Maciej Wierzyński

Opinions expressed in columns for tvn24.pl are not an editorial position.

Maciej Wierzyński – television journalist, publicist. After the imposition of martial law, released from TVP. In 1984 he emigrated to USA. He was a scholarship holder of the Stanford University and the University of Penn State. He founded the first Polish -language Polvision channel for many hours on cable television “Group in” in the USA. In the years 1992–2000 he was the head of the Polish Głos Section of America in Washington. From 2000, the editor -in -chief of New York “Nowy Dziennik”. He has been associated with TVN24 since 2005.