Czech Contact Lenses

8. 3. 2010 / Miroslav Holub

It always used it as a tale to protect me from Americans thinking I am some poor Stalinist hunger survivor from the Soviet Union, but a person who was barely alive when the old regime died. By letting them know that we have more than beer and great women, I told them about the contact lenses. Always followed by a self-soothing tale about our historical victimization, being robbed of our ideas for centuries, contact lenses being just one more of them. Some Americans made a fortune on it, while our humble inventor spent a life of communist greyness. Soon I changed it to Canadians made a fortune on it, after understanding that Americans are not prone to self-depreciation jokes told by a foreigner from what they perceive as some remote Soviet satellite.

But not long after I started to understand that we Czechs all have some sort of built-in pair of contact lenses. Our view comes protected by an almost invisible gelatin that, though it makes reality sharper, leaves our eyes untouched by the external elements. We like to see it "how it actually really is" and because of that extraordinary ability to deconstruct any hero or supernatural belief we think we are more adult, that we are higher than other nations. Not in terms of economic achievement or even scientific understanding, or in the ladder of human evolution, but we do carry a hidden certainty that we see things like no one else, that we are immune to the fairy tales of religion, patriotism, past heroism, any "isms", anyway... We just sometimes pretend to be, but deep inside we mold who we are according only to the real needs of life, unlike those dreamer foreigners. We live in eternal survival gear, we go through life, not living it to the full, like so many other nations.

Here in the U.S. people seem to be faking their sympathy and happiness, yes -- but at the same time the reason why they seem to be doing this is a sincere desire to please, to share their rainbow, to make things better not only for themselves, but for us all. Sometimes I even have sparks of realization that in some things Americans are much more communist than we pretended to be. They take the common good seriously, probably because of their evangelical suburban community culture. They give their work, their full effort and engagement, much more than money.

This is what I mostly think we lack in our Czech culture. How can we develop when everybody is playing in their own one-player game? We are not good at team playing, we don't trust our own brothers. We were told what to do for hundreds of years by other nations, so maybe we developed a mini-version of that in the family cell, despising each attempt of forcing us to act or do anything, having the freedom from having to live among other human beings as our first early goal. Just like Americans early in their lives dream of a car, we dream of getting out of our households. Many of us of our countries, like me.

Why, if I like my country, if I spend so many nights watching broken streams from TV programs I would never watch when I was still living in my country, just to hear my language, listen to the corruption affairs of my own people, get entertained by silly shows that give me a sense of being part of the whole, sharing a cheap joy with "my" people?

I left my country for what I could not find there, but I miss it for what is not possible to find anywhere else. So, besides having learned about our Czech discomfort with the foreign elements, in a non-figurative sense with foreign ways of being, with being touched or having too close to us something that doesn't correspond to our "more realistic", adult way of seeing things, I also learned that once you leave your country for too long, you never feel like home anywhere. Not in your new country of residence, not in your original home. You get a broken soul.

That was when I was able to get out of my pragmatic, materialistic, realistic Czech set of mind and realized the existence of this other level of our being, an ethereal side, not able to be touched or priced, but as real as a punch: my soul had to be broken in two, one Czech and another global, for me to see it.

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