Cry me a river

As we have done for many years now, we planned a lengthy trip for the Fall, both as a celebration of Peggy's birthday and as our annual gift to ourselves. Like many of our age, we have been so fortunate as to have what we require by way of home and such and we live modestly. What we covet are experiences, especially meeting new people and seeing places in which we have long been interested. So, along with our travel buddies we planned a river cruise this year down the Danube first visiting Prague then beginning the journey from Budapest to Amsterdam. It was of particular interest for me as my paternal grandparents were originally from Czechoslovakia and Austria/Hungary.

No one a year ago foresaw the drought that afflicted Europe this year leaving the Danube and Rhine rivers at historically low levels. Did I say low? In some places one could walk across the river--and WW2 wrecks and other interesting objects previously submerged lie openly on the surface. It is likely that it will be next year after the snow melts in the Alps that both rivers will once again be navigable from one end to the other. It is not the first time a weather calamity has disrupted river travel on these crucial waterways that transport a significant amount of Europe's food, materiel, and of course, tourists. Floods have also resulted in disruptions and as a result the EU is engaged in a project to build new locks and a parallel channel for shipping that in the next decade will alleviate such challenges. The alternative, to which we can attest, is truck traffic--long lines of which we saw as we were bussed around the Danube's low points to swap ships and continue our journey.

But my post today is not so much about the journey as about the places and people we met along the way. I want to say a few things about our respective cultures and what they reveal about our country and others. I'll start with a trivial thing--public restrooms. Across 5 different countries we had need from time to time as we walked through cities and towns for hours at a time. Public facilities are typically well identified and readily available but almost always require a fee. It is nominal, about the equivalent of .50. On the other hand they are universally well maintained, clean and staffed to keep them that way. In our country, public restrooms are free--often hard to find, however, and in my experience not always very clean or maintained. What does that say about us, and about Europeans? I think it reveals an underlying sentiment about people, respect for basic necessities and health. But draw your own conclusions.

Of far more weighty substance I was profoundly struck by the degree to which the lessons of the past are not only prominent but woven into the present day in schools, in museums, on city streets, intrinsically woven into the memories of modern day Europeans, including those who were born well after the world wars, the colonial era and for whom these lessons would otherwise be--as they are increasingly in our country --long forgotten. European governments make it a point to remind their citizens of their past, and not just the bright spots but just as important their dark, and difficult past, including their complicity in slavery, discrimination, and genocide. It isn't just a few countries, we have seen it everywhere, in Spain, in Italy in France, Poland, Croatia in short, in every country that has experienced at first hand the tyranny and repression of an authoritarian regime.

While our present administration is systemically erasing our past, editing out every reference to anything unseemly in our own history from our schoolbooks, museums, libraries and public places even from our memories, citizens of the Netherlands are reminded of the key role they played in the slave trade, over 300 years ago and in Austria, and Germany celebrating the Nazi ideology in any way will get you thrown into jail. In our country neo-nazism flourishes, and the holocaust is denied, while American tourists pose for selfies at Auschwitz . In Prague and Budapest no one has forgotten Soviet occupation. In light of present day tensions it looms large in every day dialog, and much of the population are not so many years away from having lived under its oppression.

Now do not get me wrong--we did not find folks avidly denouncing their past, or even making reference to it in casual conversation but it is there in the background always and sometimes in the course of daily life acknowledged and unforgotten. In Maastricht, the first city in the Netherlands to be liberated in WW2 we learned that families in Aachen --a nearby town which was the site of a horrific battle, to this day adopt a US soldier that was killed there and keep his memory alive--often conversing with relatives generations removed. There are more applicants then there are soldiers. Our VFW halls, memorials and veteran's homes are fast disappearing.

I am not suggesting European superiority, but I am laying out evidence of a different and stark cultural divide. What happens when a country and a peoples are subjected to the cruelty of authoritarianism, when they have suffered poor decisions and examine their past actions in light of the present? And my conclusion is this. As George Santayana famously said "“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” .