Sunday, May 30, 2010
(I was in Budapest, Hungary when I wrote this post- GF)
During the past week there have been three or four times when I have realized that this Rush song is playing in my head. I pulled it up a couple of times on the iPod, and this afternoon I reread the lyrics. Neal Peart is a masterful poet, and this song (“Heresy”) is one of his best. Reading it just now brought tears to my eyes.
I was reading a book about the Statue Park and the Communist history of Hungary. I know I can never truly sympathize—and neither can Neal Peart, because he is a Canadian and I am a citizen of the U.S.
However, in walking around this city I am starting to love, and talking to the people I know as friends, I can seek to understand.
The years of 1989 and 1990 must have been an unforgettable time to live in Europe, and a time when the future seemed infinite and indescribable. As I am always joking, “we are living in the future”—this is the Europe that exists 20 years later. I love that the statue park exists as a way for the city of Budapest to say, “This is a part of our past, and a part of our history. We must discuss it openly, and we must never forget where we have been.”
It is a part of my history, too. I can remember crouching under desks in elementary school, the bomb shelter under the Science Place at Fair Park in Dallas, and watching the Berlin wall come down on the news. The question that Peart asks in the song is a great question: “All those precious wasted years—Who will pay?”
It is the right question because the emotional response to the crimes of war, repression, and terror is always the same. “Someone must be punished,” we say, as if the punishment could possibly equal the crime. I remember the U.S. in the months after September 11, 2001. The sentiment was constantly expressed—most eloquently by our own fearless leader, W. “We have to find the evildoers and make them pay.”
The reality, the truth I found on the streets of Baghdad in 2004, is that we all pay. Even those of us who were not responsible for the crimes against humanity that took place behind the Iron Curtain, on the morning of September 11, or in the “liberation” of Iraq have to deal with the aftermath. We have to pick up the broken pieces of our lives and work toward a better future.
I can see the scars of the war and the Iron Curtain on this city. The bridges were rebuilt, but the lives that could have been can never be brought back. I see the scars when I look in the mirror. I can never change the man I have been. Wherever I go, whatever I do with my life, I am still the guy who pointed a pistol at a kid in Sadr City.
Who will pay? Me. You. All of us.
“Heresy”Lyrics By Neal Peart(this song was released on the 1991 album “Roll the Bones”)
All around that dull gray world
From Moscow to Berlin
People storm the barricades
Walls go tumbling in
The counter-revolution
People smiling through their tears
Who can give them back their lives
And all those wasted years?
All those precious wasted years —
Who will pay?
All around that dull gray world
Of ideology
People storm the marketplace
And buy up fantasy
The counter-revolution
At the counter of a store
People buy the things they want
And borrow for a little more
All those wasted years
All those precious wasted years
Who will pay?
Do we have to be forgiving at last?
What else can we do?
Do we have to say goodbye to the past?
Yes I guess we do
All around this great big world
All the crap we had to take
Bombs and basement fallout shelters
All our lives at stake
The bloody revolution
All the warheads in its wake
All the fear and suffering
All a big mistake
All those wasted years
All those precious wasted years
Who will pay?
