The More Things Change

By David Simmons

In the autumn of 1980, I spent several happy weeks in Greece. It was a very different country than it is today; indeed, it was a different era.

Often called the "cradle of democracy", Greece had up to that point actually enjoyed modern democracy for only about five years. It had just rejoined NATO, and there were protests in the streets of Athens – for or against the alliance I didn't know. It could have been either; one of the poorest countries in Europe, Greece had been spending huge amounts of money on its military machine, apparently in fear of nearby Turkey, which was also a NATO member. So maybe the idea was that after rejoining the alliance, Greece could spend badly needed funds bringing its social services up to European standards.

On the other hand, NATO did not have a good reputation in those days. It was the middle of the Cold War, and the United States, having largely screwed up the struggle against communism in Asia, was supporting brutal dictatorships and death squads all over Latin America in the name of crushing the Red Menace. And in the eyes of many, NATO and the US military-industrial complex were one and the same. It was, as noted above, a different era.

So I wasn't sure what the protesters wanted. I wasn't very politically aware back then, just emerging from the intellectual wasteland of Protestant fundamentalism. Still, specific grievances aside, there was a broad sense that having finally rid themselves of their monarchy and military dictators and embraced the form of government whose name they had coined millennia before, democracy was here to stay. It was a time of hope, especially for the young.

I settled into a flophouse on the south coast of Crete populated largely by young Brits. Maggie Thatcher had been in power for about a year, and the miracles of monetarism were already having their effect. British youth were flocking to the Mediterranean for working holidays – mostly picking olives by day and enjoying cheap moussaka and ouzo by night. Still, everyone knew the UK's economic woes would soon be over. After the pain of Thatcherism would come the gain of European-style stability. It was a time of hope, and a good time to be young.

That November, another disciple of Milton Friedman came to power, the B-movie actor Ronald Reagan. One wag in the flophouse quipped, "I see a fiery glow over Tehran." The weak, incompetent president Jimmy Carter had crashed and burned, just like the helicopters he had sent into the Iranian desert. Soon, it was thought, the Khomeini theocracy would do the same, renewing hope for modernization of the Middle East.

Eventually, as autumn began transiting into winter and the Mediterranean surf became less inviting, I abandoned Crete and moved on to a kibbutz in the northern Negev, just east of the Gaza Strip. Founded in 1949, it was a large primarily agricultural kibbutz with a secular socialist philosophy. Kibbutzim of that persuasion had not been having an easy ride since the election of the right-wing former Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin, but the hopes of young Israelis, for the full embracement of human rights and for peace with the Palestinians, remained strong.

The literal voice of that hope was anchored not far offshore on a former Dutch cargo ship renamed MV Peace, the home of a radio station partly funded by John Lennon and called Kol HaShalom, the Voice of Peace. Days after my arrival at the kibbutz, Lennon was shot and killed in New York City. Like much of the world, everyone on the kibbutz – Zionists, socialists, industrialists, Bedouin orchard workers, foreign volunteers – mourned this loss, as Kol HaShalom and the Armed Forces Radio played Lennon's songs for 24 hours.

But mere bullets can't destroy hope. Soon it was Christmas, and our Jewish hosts turned over the kitchen facilities to the foreign volunteers and brought in special supplies so we could feast together. On New Year's Eve, we tried to stay awake as everyone's home time zone ushered in 1981. Because of the 10-hour time difference, we didn't make it to mine.

But it's the thought that counts, and good thoughts – for prosperity and democracy in Greece, for peace in the Middle East, for the success of the European experiment of human rights and economic equality, for a global end to poverty, war, racism and injustice – prevailed.

It was an era that belonged not to Thatcher, Reagan, Begin or Khomeini, and certainly not to Mark David Chapman. It belonged to youth, and the power of hope.