Five Czechs, 30 Years Later, on What It Felt Like to Return to Europe

No one seems to talk about "Europe" more than Eastern Europeans do. For them, Europe is a question.

"A couple in their fifties. The husband is shaving in front of the mirror, and he sees his wife pass behind him. He says, thoughtfully: thirty years ago you were in your twenties. It was the worst of times, but it was exactly when you were most beautiful."

Thirty years. The young people of that time have grown old; the children of that time have grown up.

Thirty years ago, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and the rest went through upheaval one after another: the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain between East and West came down, the Soviet Union collapsed.

In 2018, it felt as though the Czech Republic spent the whole year marking the centenary of the First Republic. Now, type "1989–2019" into a web browser and the entries that pop up on their own seem to remind us that thirty years ago was the most recent upheaval of the entire European order.

The French Institute on Štěpánská Street in Prague has put together a lecture series called "The Road to Europe," roughly one talk a month. The titles include "Europe's Reformers Have Left: An Endless Crisis," "Are Europe and Young People a Good Match?," "An Angry Europe," "Moving to Europe: Government, State, Citizen," "Europe and Climate: The Challenge of This Century," "Women in Europe, Religion and Fanaticism/Secularism," and "Europe's Exiles and Adoptions: History as the Key to Understanding Contemporary Issues." The speakers come from France, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, and include politicians, philosophers, historians and educators. The statement of the series' theme reads: "Beyond the history and context that come to mind, our goal is to understand contemporary Europe. We will reflect on the social, cultural and political spheres that are shaping Europe's identity and its future path."

The Polish Institute in Prague is also holding seminars on the questions of these thirty years, and on thirty years of relations between Czechs and Poles.

Czech Radio has made a special program called "2019: Thirty Years of Freedom Await Us — Looking Back at the Events That Led to the Velvet Revolution." Prague's Lucerna Palace will hold a commemorative evening on November 16. The National Gallery in Prague will put on a three-month photography exhibition on the theme.

Brussels, Berlin...

People are happy to use the word "upheaval" for thirty years ago, and they accept the phrase "returning to Europe" too. Thirty years ago the upheaval began, and the thirty years since have in fact held even more change. The historian Michal Kopeček believes that a society's diversity is its most natural and most valuable quality, and that the most interesting stretches of history are the ones with change in them; these thirty years saw several times the usual amount of change, which is what makes them fascinating.

Zlata Černá is 87. Sitting in her apartment in a century-old building in Prague 2, she gave us the scene that opens this piece. She also told us about her childhood, her family, her father, the First Republic. Born in the 1930s, she has had her life cut into three parts by a century of politics: she lived through the Second World War, the postwar years, and the whole period up to the upheaval of 1989. Her father was a member of parliament under the First Republic, and during the war he went to England with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile under Beneš. Because of her family, Černá learned to stay out of politics and put herself into scholarship instead, becoming an art theorist and a sinologist. She said, with complete conviction: "These thirty years have been a great success. There have been plenty of problems, but I believe many of those situations were stages we had to pass through, and things are still changing."

We talked with a few people about their thirty years, asking them to range freely over their personal memories of the period and their assessment of how society had changed. What follows holds stories, feelings and opinions, and touches on where these thirty years began, how they connect to the history before them, and what they have to do with the European Union.

Petr said these thirty years were fair competition built on an unfair starting point. Zuzana told me the 1990s were unforgettable, that it felt like first love. I interviewed Mr. Grospič because he is deputy chairman of the Communist Party, true, but what I had really hoped to hear was his view as an individual; instead I kept feeling that his account could never get out from under the shadow of that role. "I wouldn't dare say the Communist Party would have done better than the various governments we've had since," he said, "but we would certainly have done better than we did in the past." The line from Břízová that moved me most was: "I like a democratic society, because we get to be responsible for ourselves."

You could say that ever since the First World War a century ago, Europe has been doing one thing: opening the age of the modern nation-state and adjusting to a new order. And what is that new order? After confrontation, argument and even open chaos, European integration and the return of Eastern Europe are the ideas this stretch of history has agreed on, and no one doubts today's democratic system any more. What people worry about now is how a society works in practice and the quality of the life it offers — questions about human nature.

I

Stanislav Grospič, 25 in 1989, 55 in 2019.

Lawyer, deputy chairman of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.

He handed in his party membership application on May 16, 1985, and was admitted in 1987. He told us with great pride that both the day he applied and the day he was admitted were the party's founding anniversary.

Grospič patiently walked us through a century of Czech history from his own point of view.

After the Czechoslovak Republic was founded in 1918, the Czechs had a state of their own for the first time in four hundred years, and the Slovaks for the first time in a thousand. Equality between men and women had already been achieved here by then; land ownership, industrial management and the division of labor were already highly developed; the state had strong production capacity and an advanced economy. Elements of socialism had appeared during the First Republic as well, but only as ideas, with nothing put into practice.

In 1948 the Communist Party took power and carried out a number of social reforms, reforms that ran straight on from what the First Republic had set out to do in 1918. In the 1950s the party cleared the negative elements out of society as fast as it could. Afterward, of course, plenty of problems appeared inside the party itself. It lost its standing and lost its sense of itself, especially between 1968 and 1969, and that planted the seeds of the upheaval of 1989. There were in fact many plans for social reform in 1968, but after that the party lacked the strength to do the work it should have done. And some of the reforms carried out by governments after 1989 ended up resembling what the Communist government had meant to do in the first place.

In 1990 society changed a great deal, and people began working for themselves. Large-scale privatization began in 1992, and in January 1993 the Czech Republic and Slovakia separated.

From the Czech Communist Party's point of view, over these thirty years the social system has really just gone back to the level of the pre-war First Republic — you could call it a step backward in social and humanistic terms. The Czech economy has been fairly good these last four or five years, but that isn't down to any party's leadership; it's because the international economy has been favorable. And we don't have an economy of our own.

People point to changes in the Czech Republic, like being free to travel abroad or study abroad. Honestly, I don't think that change is worth mentioning. Because in fact only a very small number of people travel or study abroad, and even thirty years ago people could go. In other words: those who could get out could get out then too, and those who can't get out still can't. It's just that now most of them can't because they don't have the money. The reasons differ, but the result is the same. These days some young people even borrow money to go on holiday, living on credit — not living within what they can afford now, but on income they haven't earned yet. That's a terrible thing.

I admit there has been some progress, but the Czech Republic hasn't done as well as it should have. A lot of people are struggling to get by; they have no interest in politics and don't vote, so today's election results don't show the real level of support for each party. This society is divided along economic lines now — whether you're rich has nothing to do with which party you belong to or support, only with money.

I think there was more democracy before 1989, and the democratic system was better: one main party held all the smaller parties together. Today's multi-party system is the form democratic countries around the world favor, but it has produced a situation where everyone has a voice, no one can reach agreement, and nothing gets done efficiently. Before 1989 the other parties still had the power to speak and take part, but decisions could be made more effectively. The Communist Party's problem then was that it had cut itself off from ordinary people and didn't really know what the public wanted. Plenty of people agree that the system before 1989 was better, but they're afraid to admit it.

Society as a whole has to understand one thing: capitalism and socialism have to be combined in the right proportion. From what I have seen over all these years, 1989 really was a turning point — change was necessary.

II

Petr Brada, 26 in 1989, 56 in 2019.

Master's in agronomy, import-export trader.

He spent a long time on the "starting point" — the starting point of what we call these "thirty years," and why that starting point wasn't the real beginning of this period of history. The question behind it: why did the upheaval of 1989 happen at all?

The changes in the Soviet Union were of course an important outside force behind the changes in our Eastern European countries.

Back then the Communist Party ran the Czechoslovak government, and the leaders of that moment happened to be completely incompetent.

The most powerful people behind the government — those with position and authority, the heads of the big state-owned enterprises and foreign trade companies — were intelligent, understood economics, and knew perfectly well how bad things were at home. They held capital, or the ability to move capital, and they wanted development, but the system and the ideology of the day tied their hands. They had money, or could get money, and they wanted to enjoy it, but the society of the time left no room for spending. So what this group wanted and needed became one of the forces driving the upheaval.

From the nineteenth century under the Austro-Hungarian Empire right up to the eve of the Second World War, Czechs were used to prosperous lives. After the First Republic was founded in 1918, a complete and mature democratic system took shape here as well. Older people remembered it firsthand, and young people learned about that earlier society and way of life from their own families, so people knew very clearly what they wanted.

Petr said these were the factors that produced the upheaval of 1989.

And many of the Czechs who later grew rich had deep ties to officials of the old regime; during the years of large-scale privatization they had a natural advantage over everyone else. So it's fair to say that the democratic system and the fair competition that followed were built on an unfair starting point.

There's another problem here. Some of today's rich men, politicians and judges need to steer around, or even cover up, discreditable parts of their past, so they use every method available to launder their image — some of it amounting to extortion. That behavior is deliberately eating away at political and judicial fairness, and it is a legacy of the earlier era.

Of everything in these thirty years, what mattered most to the Czech Republic was joining the European Union in 2004.

In the fifteen years before joining, the Czech Republic had a free economy, free capitalism and an open market. After joining, it came under the EU's control. The EU regulates the economy through its support systems — take the biofuel strategy, which pays high subsidies for growing the rapeseed used to make biodiesel. To get the subsidy everyone planted rapeseed, and after a few years, with no crop rotation and no fallow periods, the soil was exhausted. A biofuel strategy on one side ended up damaging the natural environment on the other. And when some companies can live on subsidies and don't need to turn a profit, free competition disappears. In that sense EU policy has hurt the Czech Republic's free economy.

Back then I said that joining the EU would hit small and medium-sized traders like me hard, but I chose to support it anyway, and I'd say the same now: a Czech Republic outside the EU is unimaginable. In other words, in terms of regional politics the Czech Republic doesn't need the EU, but it does need to avoid making enemies of its neighbors; seen globally, the EU is necessary, and I have no doubt about that at all.

But the EU should develop by following the natural course of things, not by leaning on simple, naive political enthusiasm.

EU member states should have similar foundations; enlargement shouldn't have been rushed the way it was, and that has caused a lot of problems. Then there's the euro. Can you imagine it — the Netherlands and Greece, two countries in such different situations, using the same currency, and that one currency doesn't even have one effective central bank behind it. Instead euro policy rests on many regions at different levels of economic development and many central banks, which weakens each region's ability to regulate itself and makes inequality worse. Building a currency like the euro should follow the natural course of development too; you can't force it.

And in recent years I've noticed a strange thing in society. Many of the people who were young or middle-aged thirty years ago were critical of the society of that time. Now that they're old, they've started living in memory. In memory one's youth is always beautiful, so they've begun to feel nostalgic for the past they once criticized. Young people today have no direct experience to compare it with — everything they know comes from reading — and some of them simply assume the past was better.

Grospič raised the same point. "A lot of the new generation never lived in the old era," he said. "They've only learned about it from books, and they simply choose to reject the past."

III

Břízová, 13 in 1989, 43 in 2019.

Master's in economics, company employee.

I was thirteen that year and didn't really understand what was happening in society; my parents explained it to me. It felt like an interesting change, one that would take some time to get used to.

Back then we couldn't travel abroad, but my parents took us traveling inside the country. I didn't know that traveling abroad was even an option, so I didn't feel anything was missing from my life. There were shortages in the shops then — no bananas, oranges hard to find, even toilet paper often out of stock — but at thirteen I paid no attention to any of it. Oh, and there were only two television channels, so we could watch only what those two broadcast, and everything in the newspapers, the magazines and the radio was filtered.

At school we used to learn only Russian, but our teacher happened to know English, so we studied with her after class. By the time I reached high school the school had begun offering English and German. That was one of the changes I lived through.

After things opened up I traveled to Austria, and I was stunned by how much there was in the shops. But our currency was worth so little that we couldn't afford to buy anything. I felt we and they lived in two completely different worlds.

I studied economics and international trade at university. Around that time Czechoslovakia split up first, and then everyone joined the EU, and I was confused: why was our not-very-large, perfectly workable country splitting into two small ones, while the countries of Europe were forming a union? I suppose I understand it now — all of it is politics. Well, politicians don't really care what people are thinking, but they do care about what they consider their political achievements.

I think the EU project is a great one, but people have to see that a lot of it doesn't happen fairly. When I was eighteen or nineteen I thought the EU would make Europe strong and narrow the gaps between European countries, but I later realized that was only a good wish, and it would never come true. Now we see how much politics sits behind everything — or rather, how politics overrides everything. And then there's the euro. I think the idea is a great one, but its execution has all kinds of problems; all kinds of forces want to manipulate it, and a perfect ideal was never going to be reachable.

Of course I absolutely agree that the Czech Republic has to be a member of the EU; there's no question about that. The Czech Republic is a small country. It can't stand outside a globalized economy and globalized politics.

Over the years, as I've gotten older, I've felt the weight of history more and more. Nationalist feeling, for instance, is coming back and growing. Many people are afraid of immigrants from Africa or the Arab world, because Europe is too small to carry the load.

One clearly bad thing about these thirty years is that a lot of people, young people especially, don't care about society. They chase an easy life while waiting for a miracle, assuming success is theirs for the taking. As it happens, politicians' ambitions also want results in a short time — they want change, they want to have accomplished something, so they draw up policies that are unrealistic but look right.

Take putting children with mild intellectual disabilities into ordinary school classes to give them the same educational opportunities as other children. It ignores the differences that actually exist. For a child with an intellectual disability, the workload can be unbearable; their behavior can disturb the normal atmosphere of the class; each of them needs a dedicated carer, and the state doesn't have anything like enough trained people. These are real problems, but people are held hostage by political correctness and don't dare say what they think.

The clearest good thing about these thirty years is that all of Europe has moved fully toward genuine democracy. I like a democratic society, because we get to be responsible for ourselves. In the past everything depended on the decisions of a few people, or even one person; now we're responsible for ourselves and carry the consequences of our own choices. Some inequality exists no matter what, but we get to choose freely to a very great degree.

Europe's form of democracy is good: a multi-party system, many choices, not one thing or the other. But for that same reason there's no clearly dominant party; governments always end up multi-party coalitions, parties have to compromise, and compromise means it's hard to have forceful policies.

In short, we're satisfied with our lives. What matters is that we have the right to choose for ourselves and to answer for ourselves.

IV

Zuzana Li, 14 in 1989, 44 in 2019.

Well-known translator and sinologist.

I remember it very clearly: 1989 hit me hard. Something big was happening in society, but I didn't understand why everyone was marching. Life had been calm and good; there was a dark side to it, of course, but I didn't feel we needed a revolution. My parents took no interest in politics, they weren't party members, and we never talked politics at home. Later, when the television and everyone else started talking about it, I came to understand, and I accepted what was being said at the time.

For me personally it all felt natural. Opportunities came along, I made use of the possibilities in front of me, and I grew up in a way that simply followed on. The high school I went to was an excellent school, and the teachers didn't really change — they were all good teachers. I studied English from a young age. After 1989 the universities clearly expanded and admitted far more students; the Chinese department at Palacký University, for instance, was set up around then. I've always been fairly strict with myself and I have a fairly strong sense of social responsibility — the state provides free university education, so since I was going to study, I felt I should study well and do something useful for society afterward. It's a very good thing that the Czech Republic has free university education, and that hasn't changed from the past. Foreign travel used to be restricted, but I was a small child then, so it didn't touch me at all. It happened that when I was young the chance to travel abroad freely was opening up, and we went to Britain, to Austria, traveling everywhere; that side of life was of course much freer. As for living standards, mine have kept rising, and I think the average Czech standard of living has kept rising too.

As for the wider social atmosphere, what I miss most is of course the early 1990s. Back then, not just the Czech Republic but all of Europe was very open, optimistic and free; everyone was smiling, full of hope for the future. Take us young people — we'd flag down a car on the road and someone would give us a lift for free and chat with us on the way. It felt so comfortable and so safe, completely different from now. It's not that things are unsafe now, exactly, but there's dissatisfaction between people, and fear, and distance; maybe this is what a more mature state looks like. It's probably a bit like the way people who lived through the Mao era, whatever they think of it now, will still feel nostalgic for, say, the atmosphere at Tiananmen Square back then, the way everyone was crazy in one way or another. The Czech Republic was never that crazy, of course, but when you have lived through that kind of society-wide upheaval, and an optimistic, happy one at that, it's like falling in love with someone — when it's your first love, you get so excited. I happened to be young at exactly that moment, and everything felt sunny. When I went to England back then, as a young Czech girl, I could clearly feel that everyone welcomed me, wanted to chat, ask me questions, talk about Czech classical music, so many subjects. It's different now. So, of course, the social atmosphere of the early 1990s is what I miss most.

Politically, under my parents' influence, I take relatively little interest. But Václav Havel was an idol for our generation, and he still is. I don't quite understand why some people — it's not that I don't understand, I understand it rationally, but I don't accept their criticism of Havel — why should Havel bear responsibility for what Miloš Zeman or Václav Klaus or other parties did? As president it simply wasn't in his power to interfere in those things. Take the Opposition Agreement signed by the Social Democrats and the Civic Democrats, an arrangement between the two biggest Czech parties of the time. That was a huge mistake made in Czech society after 1989, one that damaged healthy political development, and I think society is still feeling the effects of that agreement today.

The problem I feel most sharply right now is that public speech has to have a floor under it. As a public figure you can't say whatever you feel like saying and then claim the next day that you didn't mean it that way. But this seems normal now, and everyone accepts it; behaving recklessly no longer brings the negative consequences it should. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but either way I'm not very willing to accept it. I hope this doesn't last long, because between individuals and within a society alike, a certain amount of good faith is needed. Keeping your word, answering for what you've said and done — that's a basic moral principle; without it the world falls into chaos. But I believe nothing is permanent, and whatever happens, things may change after a while. Maybe we need to go through a stage like this before we can become a truly mature society.

I don't think Czech democracy is very mature. The democratic system is mature in theory, but people's mentality isn't fully mature. The Czech Republic still runs on personal connections — if your relationships are good, you can get in through the back door. The Czech Republic needs to do better: on one hand the system should force people to take responsibility for their own mistakes; on the other there's the quality of the people themselves, and the system needs people to improve it.

I don't think the line between Eastern and Western Europe means much any more, especially for countries like the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia, which are closer to Western Europe. But there are certainly traces left from before, and their influence hasn't fully run out, because that influence takes shape inside everyone's way of life and way of thinking.

A sense of Slavic identity certainly exists, historically speaking, and globalization now has a fairly large psychological effect on everyone as well. But the twentieth century's ideas about blood and race have basically been rejected. I don't think of myself as Slavic or as anything in particular, and I don't think young people tend to think that way either — especially with everyone traveling everywhere now, people find there isn't much difference between one another. Among young people, in my own circle, ethnicity isn't a topic. Of course I know every country has its conservatives and its nationalists, but I still hope nationalism doesn't become a big problem; we've already had the lessons of history, and that isn't the road we should take.

Also, if you look at history rationally you'll see that every time the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, has leaned toward the East and Russia, the results haven't been good; when our relations with the West have been good, our development has generally been better. That's the rational view, of course — national feeling isn't a rational matter.

I feel hopeful about young people: those born in the 1990s certainly, and maybe those born in the 1980s too. They have more courage to go out and take risks, to dare to make mistakes.

V

Michal Kopeček, 15 in 1989, 45 in 2019.

Historian, working on twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectual and political history.

In 1989 I followed events closely. I was only fifteen, but I was already thinking that I didn't like the state this country was in and that I wanted a democratic revolution. I grew up in the 1990s — that was my youth, and I enjoyed the freedom of that time. Freedom brings its own problems too, of course; that's a fact. But we still want a free environment more than anything, and I hope this country keeps it.

In times of hostility and war a strong system is needed. In peacetime, though, society is diverse, and diversity is what's most valuable, and no form of absolute power can solve all of society's many different problems. There's no better way than democracy to let all of people's interests and views meet and collide, and to make progress through opposition and argument.

As a citizen, my assessment of these thirty years is that they add up to more gained than lost, more positive than negative.

A lot of it has been good for Czech society, the economy and culture. On the negative side there's the gap between rich and poor — with democracy as the foundation, the left should work hard to play its part in a democratic political environment. We are a wealthy country; there shouldn't be people living on the street, and society can offer more help. The government can't force people's behavior — if someone genuinely wants to live on the street, you can only let them. But we should give them more opportunities and more possibilities.

I really do think the EU is an incredible, ambitious combination of market freedom and democratic politics. As a citizen of the EU I can do what I want to do, as long as it doesn't infringe on other people's freedom. Market economy, market efficiency, political democracy, individual political freedom: these are the elements of EU citizenship. The EU does need a mechanism that can make political decisions effectively, but that's very hard; it's simply a feature of democracy itself, and right now we are twenty-four democracies. Once Britain leaves we'll soon be twenty-three democracies, of course. How to bring twenty-three democracies together and make decisions at the democratic level of the EU — that's a very exciting undertaking. I don't know how it can be done, but I still believe in the EU.

As a historian, I have to say this period is a major turning point in our history, with striking social change.

First, a complete political transformation. We have multi-party democratic politics. I'm not saying that's some wonderful thing — there really are a lot of problems, and democracy has a cost that has to be paid. But it's an open system: many political questions, many parties, many political forces competing with each other for power, and that competition is visible, out in public view, in public debate, fought out in parliament, fought out in the media. That's the political change — an open society, an open system of democratic competition.

Second, a complete economic transformation, one that changed the whole logic of how the economy runs. Manufacturing was transformed and enterprises were privatized. Looking back after thirty years, we are compatible with the market economies of Western Europe and the world, which means we are deeply integrated into the European and global capital economy. It also means that the economy today, compared with thirty years ago, is very efficient, and that is genuinely admirable. What I mean is this: because the economy is so open, and our country is small with a small economy, we depend heavily on the German economy, the European economy, the global economy, and that leaves us open to shocks. But take the 2008 financial crisis — the way the Czech Republic handled it deserves real respect.

Then the changes in the composition of the state and in geopolitics. In 1989 we were the Czechoslovak Republic; in 1993 we split into the independent Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. Looking back now, I can say this was a good thing. The Czech Republic and Slovakia never had a history of hostility like, say, the Balkan states had with each other. After separating we both joined the EU, and that changed the geopolitical situation of both countries enormously. We became members of NATO and the EU, things no one would have dared dream of in the 1980s. Our region was once inside the Soviet sphere; now it has returned to being part of the West.

And social change. From the egalitarian society prized thirty years ago, the transformation has produced social division. For a democratic society and a free market, egalitarianism isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if a society's foundation is egalitarianism, that comes at a high price. So I admire parts of that history from thirty years ago, but not the whole of it. The idea behind socialism, or state socialism, was that no one should be living on the street in absolute poverty, that the number of homeless people should be held to a minimum. I think the Czech system, and the EU system, carry a fair amount of social sensitivity on this; unlike Britain and America, continental European countries try to bring the poorest groups into welfare programs of some kind, giving their lives more possibilities.

Speaking broadly, these thirty years have brought incredible change, because we changed our politics, changed our geopolitics, and in a certain sense changed our culture, changed our society, changed our economy. In a researcher's terms, this amounts to a triple, quadruple, many-times-over transformation. It really is the biggest transformation within our direct field of view, and it is a fascinating period, well worth studying.

About the Author

Han Kui was one of the first hundred correspondents of the Beijing Middle School Students' News Agency, and graduated from the Central Institute of Finance and Banking (now the Central University of Finance and Economics). She has lived in Prague for more than twenty years, running a company and working in cultural exchange, and has served as a special correspondent for Phoenix TV. In her spare time she writes about what she observes and experiences in the Czech Republic; she has contributed to magazines including World Vision and View the World, and has published the essay collections Gone to the Bohemian Hills and Prague, Prague. She is a co-founder of the Czech-China International Cultural Exchange Association and of the Prague Chinese Writers' Residence.

She says: "I've lived in the Czech Republic for more than twenty years. My husband, Xu Hui, even lived through the breakup of Czechoslovakia himself. The Czech Republic alone can't stand for all the former Eastern European countries that went through upheaval in 1989, but it is one angle, and it is representative up to a point. As we remember it, the air in the nineties was better than it is now, and it snowed more too — we haven't had to shovel snow in years. Back then the economy was monotonous, the market was uniform and goods were scarce; the government kept the environment loose, which drew in cheap, fast goods to meet demand and gave a fair number of Chinese businesspeople an opening. Now shopping malls and brand boutiques are everywhere and the market is clearly more mature and varied; online you can find notices for every kind of event; young people don't only take part in local events — they'll follow Chicago time or London time to watch a livestream they're interested in; people pour into the streets on important anniversaries, or when they have something to demand... The new generation has already made its own ordinary way of life. The old marks may still sit in corners no one notices, but life seems always to have been like this, and that is how it should be."

Cover image: a still from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, via Douban.