Walesa’s pursuit of change

In a conversation with Lech Walesa last week, my thoughts returned to the tension-riddled Cold War period of a quarter-century ago, when he summoned the courage to stand against the communist colossus in Poland.

The combination of faith and conviction that shepherded him through those difficult days still clearly radiates from Walesa’s eyes. Long before his prestigious awards and historic presidency of Poland, that combination of faith and conviction was his single greatest asset; it remains so today.

The ability to dream, to motivate oneself, to inspire others and to turn those intangibles into a force for positive change – even against formidable, seemingly impossible challenges – is needed more than ever in these tumultuous times.

I was a post-graduate student in London at the moment of the world’s introduction to Walesa. From my position just across the continent, his efforts – while awe-inspiring – appeared virtually futile. As singer/songwriter Jim Croce used to say, “You don’t pull on Superman’s cape; you don’t spit into the wind; you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger; and you don’t mess around with Jim.”

The countries of Eastern Europe knew painfully well what had occurred in the past when they tugged on the hammer and sickle, spat in the direction of communism’s imposing strength; pulled the mask off Marxist-Leninist myths; and messed around with former Soviet bosses Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

But for all its might and bluster, the Soviet Union – like Big Jim Walker in Croce’s song – surprisingly hit the floor. In the end, Moscow and its transnational, revolutionary, ideological cloak proved vulnerable. In fact, the Soviets presided over an inefficient, soulless system of rhetoric and illusion that resorted to intimidation and repression to hide its shortcomings and deprive its subjects of fundamental rights and dignity. Those practices extended to Soviet puppets in Eastern Europe’s capitals, including former President Wojciech Jaruzelski in Warsaw.

Walesa understood that dire situation, as did most Poles and others living under the communist yoke. And they harbored no illusions about the difficulty, danger and dedication of time that ridding themselves of their burden would require. But once they had recharged their spirits and resolved to act, Polish communism faced numbered days.

It required nearly a decade for Walesa and his followers to prevail, but I am confident that, had the time frame been twice that or longer, they would have patiently persevered. And they would have won.

Such a willingness to approach challenges with a long-term perspective, unflappable persistence and endless creative planning – which the Cold War demanded – appears in disturbingly short supply in the 21st century. Yet it remains the better strategy to tackle the most nettlesome problems – including the global terrorist threat.

If Walesa had simply shrugged, accepted oppression as inevitable, resigned himself to suffering, and failed to learn about and probe the system’s weaknesses, a communist version of Big Jim Walker could still hold the Polish people in his iron-fisted grip.

Similarly, indifference, fatalism and ignorance in dealing with terrorism would merely grant its perpetrators a non-expiring license to murder and maim.

It is time for the naysayers to stop avoiding reality. Terrorists will not voluntarily fade away. Nor is the world destined to endure the terrorists’ wrath. The terrorist threat, which is as real and pervasive as Walesa’s communist nightmare, must be intensely analyzed and confronted during the long term, with the aim of tracing its roots and eliminating as many of them as possible.

To succeed, as Walesa demonstrated, we must dream, motivate ourselves, inspire others and collectively turn those intangibles into a force for positive change, even against the formidable, seemingly impossible terrorist threat. We need only summon the power.