We don’t have many traditions in my family. We don’t sit around the Seder table asking questions; we don’t eat Chinese food on Christmas; we don’t have Taco Tuesdays or Gefilte Fish Fridays. We are pretty ordinary people in that sense. Or every sense.
There is one tradition that I’d like to keep and pass along to my kid – sitting down for the road.
Every time we were about to leave on a trip my Dad always said “Let’s sit down for the road” and we would set down our suitcases and sit quietly for a minute. It wasn’t my favorite thing to do – when you are a kid on the way to an exiting destination the last thing you want to do is to be stopped in your tracks and sit around even for a minute. But then again it’s a minute well-spent. You could realize you forgot something, or just look around one last time so a memory of your place will travel with you and eventually make you homesick. You could concentrate, finalize a plan, prepare for the departure, as a pilot might say revving up the engine. Many useful things you can do in a minute. Or you can just not do anything and wait for your Dad to signal that the sitting down for the road is over and open the door to something that awaits outside.
I’ve done this ever since I can remember. I sat down in places I’ve never returned to; I sat down with people who I never got to see again; I sat down before the trips I remember and many forgotten ones. Now I get to tell my kid to sit down and I like the continuity of it. It’s a real tradition, beautiful in its simplicity and as meaningful as one wants it to be.
When I was drafted in July 1988, there were only 8 months remaining in the 9-year war in Afghanistan but no one knew it at the time. Luck of the draft could throw you into the Army for two years or in the Navy for three, you could end up in a 100-degree desert or somewhere inside the Arctic Circle, in a tank, on a submarine, parachute-jumping or digging ditches, but all of these were preferable to the hell-hole that was Afghanistan. There was never any official information about what was going on there but despite the fact that the government tried to hide the funerals everybody knew that people were coming back in the zinc caskets. Over 15 thousand of them during the course of war. Many people came home handicapped trying to rebuild their lives in the country where nothing was handicap accessible, many had to live with mental problems, many returned with bloody nightmares preventing them from leading anything resembling normal lives. They were 20 years old, in the army they didn’t volunteer for, in the country where they were despised, fighting for something no one believed in.
Twenty years ago today the last Soviet troops crossed the bridge home. In the end there were no winners in this war: Afghanistan is still a hell-hole and one of the poorest countries in the world, many young Soviet lives were lost or damaged, and Americans are now finding out what Russians learned 20 years ago, by some twist of fate reusing the same airforce base where rusting Soviet equipment is slowly turning into sand. That’s why I was against sending American troops to Afghanistan, people who have nothing to lose and no regard for human life cannot be beat, just annihilated. We need to get our troops out of there.
Below is a video that contains the footage of the Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan on February 15, 1989. The video starts with soldiers watching Gorbachev congratulating the country with the New Year 1989. The song in the background is “We are leaving”. In the end there is a photo of Igor Lyahovich – the last Soviet soldier killed in Afghanistan and the final statistics of the killed and wounded.
These photos of the Santa Claus School where one could get a B.S.C. (Bachelor of Santa Claus) degree for $75 were published in the Life Magazine in 1961. Nowadays, our kids are forced to sit on the laps of uneducated Santas who probably can’t even pass the drug test.
Just like many other great speeches, Churchill’s Sinews of Peace address delivered on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri was reduced to a few soundbites that everyone recognizes but can’t necessarily put in a context. In this case there is probably not a person alive who haven’t heard about the Iron Curtain, a Cold War reference to the division between the Soviet- and Western-influenced zones in Europe. For almost half a century, the Iron Curtain dominated the international relations, as well as lives of hundreds of millions of people. Today, its legacy is still haunting the world and, on a smaller scale, provides inspiration to a large section of this blog.
