Living in the Dull, Gray Middle

It was like some grim, futuristic motion picture, except that you realize the people in a movie are just acting. Each morning I stood at the window of my hotel room watching thousands of locals walking to the trains. They moved together almost in step, with very little personal space. They walked grimly, always facing forward. And there was no laughter, no banter, no sarcasm or humorous chatter about last week-end. There was only a brooding silence, interrupted occasionally by the sounds of shuffling feet, a cough, or a subway bell.

Every afternoon, the people of Minsk came home the same way.

I was in Belarus just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It had been more than 2 years since the fall, but the possibilities afforded by freedom had not sunk in. The incumbent president was already maneuvering to realign with Russia. Senior adults were frustrated by the transition to democracy because the bread lines were sometimes less predictable. Before democracy, they had never enjoyed abundance, but the slow trickle of hard, tasteless loaves had been fairly constant.

My Western eyes could not miss the aftermath of a government controlled economy. There was no profound, abject poverty. And there was no over the top affluence. Rather, everyone lived in that gray middle zone uninterrupted by life's extremes. When there is no room for utter failure or paralyzing pain, there is also no possibility of extravagant joy or heroic accomplisment. There is just existence.

The state run apartments that everyone called home were the perfect measure of Soviet life. No, they were not filthy dumps. But neither did even one of them hint of art or elegance. Rather, they all loomed over the gray landscape like forty-year old monuments to surrender- massive and blocky, dim and inconvenient, but available and economical. Nobody lives on the street. But nobody dares aspire for something better.

Today the US government is buying up large shares of what once was private industry. The feds are eagerly seeking control of healthcare and the administrative ability to determine who gets treatment and who has to die without care. There is a full court press to limit greenhouse gases by assuming greater control over energy companies, utilities and their pricing structures. I cannot shake this suffocating sensation of marching together toward the trains of Minsk.

The snowball is rolling, and rapidly gaining momentum. Very soon every American may indeed have some form of goverment sponsored medical care. Take your card and get in line. Before long, there will be no homeless vagrants and no megabucks billionaires. But it won't feel like Heaven. It will seem more like the dull, gray middle where everyone fondly recalls the great risks and daring possibilities of what we once knew as "freedom."