Something to Feel Good About

By Volodymyr Kish

The 2010 Winter Olympics held recently in Vancouver were a tremendous success for Canada. The bounteous harvest of gold, silver and bronze medals spurred a sense of pride and achievement that has seldom been felt in Canada’s history. 

We all have an innate need to be winners, to feel proud about either our own successes or those of a group that we identify with. There are few individuals whose accomplishments enable them to satisfy their ego’s need for recognition and appreciation, so for most folks, this need is assuaged by the success and accomplishments of their family, team, gang, tribe, ethnic group or country. We measure ourselves and live and die by the deeds and success of the social groups we identify ourselves with.

In the case of Ukrainians, this subconscious craving for social recognition has proven to be a particularly difficult challenge.  For most of our history, Ukraine has been subjugated by a series of colonizers and oppressors that have sought to persuade both Ukrainians and the outside world that we did not even exist.  Five centuries of propaganda and self-serving distorted history by our conquerors have hammered home the thesis that Ukraine and Ukrainians don’t exist.  We are simply “small Russians”, or a Polish sub-culture or an illiterate bunch of peasants with no history, no culture and a language that is but a dialect of something else.  Because we have been a subjugated people, we have not been able to effectively fight back, to correct the historical falsifications and the slanders about our past and our identity.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a free and relatively democratic Ukraine has finally given us an opportunity to redress some of these wrongs and create some initiatives towards rebuilding our pride and sense of self worth.  Sad to say, we have not taken advantage of that opportunity to the extent that we should have.

To be fair, there has been some progress.  We have made the world more aware of the horrors of the Holodomor and the evils that the Soviet system perpetrated on Ukraine.  The opening up of Soviet era archives have enabled historians to begin providing a more accurate historical picture of Ukraine, its past and the struggles it has had to endure in attaining independence and asserting its rights as a full-fledged nation state.

Yet, we have failed to provide to the younger generations of Ukrainians both in Ukraine and the diaspora a more positive, motivating and pride-inducing portrait of our history, our culture and our worth as a distinct ethnic and geopolitical entity.  Far too much of what we produce in terms of historical and cultural output focuses on our victimization, our suffering, our oppression and our failures in establishing ourselves as a legitimate nation on the European and world stage.  Undoubtedly, that is a fundamental reality of our history, but it is not all of it, and in any case, that is not what should be the primary area of our focus in building a more successful future.

To do that, we must engage our younger generations both here and in Ukraine to care and become involved in safeguarding Ukraine’s current tenuous independence and in pushing Ukraine on the proper course of becoming a modern, democratic, free enterprise European country.  To do this, we must give them some strong and inspiring role models from Ukrainian history.  We must introduce them to the fact that Ukraine was at various times in its existence a dynamic and successful country.  We must introduce them to Ukrainian heroes that they can feel proud of and emulate.  Our focus must shift from the overwhelming picture of victimization we are currently stuck with, to a vision of Ukraine that is based on past glories, accomplishments and leaders that once made Ukraine a great nation.

It is time to rewrite the curriculums that currently dominate our Ridna Shkolas to focus more on giving our youth a more positive “feel good” picture of what being a Ukrainian means and emphasizing the more heroic, creative and encouraging aspects of our history and culture.  Our writers, poets, song writers and artists should strive to reflect the inspiring rather than the depressing.  We need to get to the point where our children and grandchildren take genuine pride and truly appreciate and value the fact that they are Ukrainian.