Сорока на плоті / The Magpie
Palm Sunday Revelation
I’d like to share with you a revelation that I experienced at 10 o’clock liturgy on Palm Sunday at St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church on East Seventh Street in Manhattan, the age-old focal point of our hromada’s brilliant, multi-faceted activity.
The church was packed, literally SRO. My wife and I had to stand shoulder to shoulder, like proverbial sardines with other congregants in the back of the church. Despite the overwhelming throng that filled both aisles half way to the altar, I felt alone. I scanned the multitude around me and the people in front and was hard pressed to spot anyone that I knew, that I could say hello to. I saw one podruha a dozen feet in front of me with her two daughters. Then I noticed the balding back of a friend’s head and next to him his wife. I also caught sight a few other faces that were familiar to me from Second Avenue but that was all.
With all deference to the latest immigrants from Ukraine, the liturgy looked like a convention of that group of Ukrainians. Newly arrived Ukrainians filled the church to the rafters and more power to them. On the other hand, the so-called post-World War II displaced persons, their baby boomer children and grandchildren were scarcely visible.
And then it occurred to me that the latter group, the “DPs” and baby boomers born and raised in America, our mentality, values and organizations, are becoming marginalized if we aren’t already marginalized. That must have been the sensation experienced by Ukrainians in America when the “DPs” arrived.
The latest immigration wave of Ukrainians demonstrates its Ukrainianism by going to church in hordes and voting when it has the opportunity and the political situation is enflamed enough. Due to their place of birth, they have been Ukrainian without making a big deal of it. Conversely, we, Ukrainian Americans, have had to make a conscious effort to demonstrate our Ukrainianism. We had to tell ourselves that we will belong, we will be active, and we will be Ukrainian. And then we were or weren’t.
The so-called fourth wave commingles outside of church, commiserates about their new lives in America, the easiest way to get landed status, maybe about "kray," and then goes home. They are convinced that is enough of a display of their Ukrainianism. They, much like our own Ukrainian American generations X, Y and Me, don’t believe Ukrainian or Ukrainian Diaspora issues require 24/7 involvement. They treat it in a contemporary, possibly healthier manner: they hop on and get off like on a subway as the situation requires. If the elections in Ukraine pique their interest, they’ll rally ‘round the flag. That is diametrically different from baby boomer generation’s approach, which was passed on to us from the 50s and the trenches of Ukraine, and stalwartly demanded round-the-clock, womb-to-tomb involvement.
It will be very difficult to convince others, be they Ukrainians from Ukraine or younger Ukrainians Americans, to become active in any civic organization in the UCCA or UCC system if we use ourselves and our mindsets as examples. We’ll scare them away. Youth associations are different, understandably, due to the emphasis on youth and the need for education and camaraderie. However, once you graduate from college and get a job, you accept real-life responsibilities and obligations that take up most of your waking hours.
So what are the grown-up, adult hromada organizations and the UCCA to do to stem the deterioration of their ranks and ensure their continued existence? Asking or urging the members of the fourth wave or Gen X, Y and Me to join a Ukrainian organization and devote six hours of their Saturdays to painstaking debates just because they’re Ukrainian is not going to work. Civic activity is low on the totem pole of things to do. Consider Republican sympathizers or voters and party membership. Consider church goers and actual parishioners. There may be a correlation between those shortfalls and our civic situation.
But the matter of maintaining what was passed on to us still gnaws at the heart.
Let’s presume that we agree that UCCA et al should exist. Does anyone care? I daresay not the people who stood next to me in church. If the UCCA ceased its activity tomorrow it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on their faces.
How do we make the UCCA and the other associations more interesting and appealing to all Ukrainians rather than the dying breed of activists, supporters, sympathizers and advisers?
First of all, we have to realize that the world has changed since the boomers took their seats at the hromada’s conference tables while the UCCA et al still operate in a 50s mentality. Four-year terms of office and interminably long meetings are counterproductive. The younger generation is growing up in a streamlined world that reaches decisions faster than it reads a text message on its Blackberry.
You can’t ask them to drive a Ford Model T. They don’t know how to. On the other hand, contemporary people can get behind the wheel of the latest Corvette, Jag or “Beemer” and drive away without any problem. The UCCA et al are really yesterday’s organizations, whether they are our grandparent’s or another group of Ukrainians’ that the fourth wave just doesn’t understand.
The executive board of the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine was right on the money when at a recent meeting it initiated the process of searching for answers to the question of what its role should be in a 21st century hromada. Other civic groups would do themselves and all of us a favor if they would follow suit.
Agreeing that UCCA and the hromada structure as we know them should exist, do they exist as mass organizations with a rigid “stand up and salute” configuration or do they exist as enablers, facilitators or influencers of policies in Washington, with severely reduced and more efficient structures? We, who have been involved for decades, might think that the UCCA is the government of the people, for the people, by the people, and expect subservience and obedience. But today we would be alone in that thinking. Nobody is listening or caring.
Would it help if the UCCA focuses exclusively on D.C. activity and Ukraine? I don’t know. A small, operational team could handle that on behalf of the community, which could be tapped only for money to fund projects. What would then happen to the heretofore traditional concept of an organized Diaspora? Would it evaporate?
Undoubtedly, there is interest in Ukraine and significantly less in ordered Diaspora issues. If we’re all in agreement and thinking alike that the UCCA et al need to be preserved, then someone isn’t thinking about how to make them better. We, all of us ancient activists and the remaining Ukrainians in American, need an escape plan – and that’s not as bad as it sounds. Each one of us, sooner or later, naturally via death or premeditatively for a handful of legitimate reasons will leave or retire the hromada. Should the last person sitting at the conference table just turn off the lights and close the door?
For whom do we leave the keys?
It’s time to start designing a hromada to the next Ukrainian activist’s taste.
IHOR DLABOHA
posted 03.23.2006
