Time for Ideals

My brother is older than me. Not much older, less than eighteen months. Anyway, he easily won all those battles and brawls, so far as I didn’t think better and more refined. You will agree with me that it isn’t an easy lot, always inviting refined things. But what on earth can you do?

In addition, my brother displayed, with a measure of understatement, some quite problematic  traits. To begin with, he was terribly honest. For seconds, he felt madly responsible. And, third, he was unbearably punctual: He comes home from school and gets down to his homework, while his buddies are all outside our door, eager to kick the ball. Is it normal?

Our mornings customarily started with a fierce battle. At daybreak, when I would normally prefer dwelling in the realm of dreams or forgotten homework,  I was rudely awakened and forced to direct my steps towards school. There we would ring the doorbell and wait till the sleepy janitor rattles his key in the door lock and utters his “you here that soon?”, whereupon we would proceed each to his classroom.

There is no way for one not to develop a complex from that. I mean a little brother complex.  Nor is it possible for the big brother complex to not exist. Now make the two make sense.

I thought of this charade when reading the Washington Declaration. It’s been 99 years since it saw light. Not that it would refer to football or rising early. It refers to a Czecho-Slovak nation, which would build its own house, after the horrors of the Great War, in which minorities have their rights, the Church will be separated from the State, women will be equal to men, aristocratic privileges will cease to apply, a conventional army will be replaced by a militia, and reforms of far-reaching economic significance will be brought to bear.

“The powers of the dark have served the victory of light – mankind’s cherished age is arising,” Masaryk, Štefánik and Beneš claimed in concert. It was a time of ideals. During the next generation’s tenure, serious complications emerged. The powers of the dark reappeared before one would have expected it. It showed that the Czecho-Slovak nation was in fact two brothers, each adorned with a different character: one with the big brother complex, the other with the little brother’s resentments. Try to make the twain meet.

So brothers parted ways in time: no referendum, no ideals. Actually, we have been doing fine, sort of, on each other’s banks of the river Morava. Everyone rings the janitor as he pleases. Moreover, we have found ourselves amidst a ramified family that calls itself a  “union” , which was born from lofty ideals, but is full of complexes: younger and older, bigger and smaller, fatter and thinner, healthy and sick, rich and poor and God knows what else.

Thank the Lord for the Union. That Union. And the sleepy janitor with the key. But thanks mainly for the ideals. It’s high time to return to them. They wield a magic power. They make people forget all  their complexes.