Curtains for the Free World
When love, history, and fates collide
I was a kid in the ‘80s, the much-maligned years of big hair, bright clothes, and synth music. If, in retrospect, those things seem so over the top, so unashamedly extra, it’s probably because they were. We needed unbridled enthusiasm and fantasy escapism to distract us from the fact that, for almost the entire decade, we lived with the certain fear of nuclear annihilation.
Think for a moment about the false ballistic missile scare of 2018, when on an otherwise quiet Saturday morning in January, Hawai‘i residents were rattled to their core by an emergency alert warning of impending nuclear attack. The message—sent to hundreds of thousands of cellphones statewide—helpfully stated in plain English that it was not a drill.
For forty minutes, people experienced the terror of knowing there was nowhere to run and, if true, surely it would be the first in an escalating series of nuclear reprisals that would end the world. Now, four years later, many remain traumatized by it.
Imagine living with that uncertainty, and that fear, all the time. That’s what living in the ‘80s was like. Sure, by then nuclear weapons had been around for forty years, but absent the Cuban Missile Crisis there was never a time when the two primary forces of a bipolar world were so dangerously close to a nuclear confrontation than in the ‘80s.
Yet, in some respects, though that was a starker world to live in, it was also a simpler one. Along with the futility and the fatalism, there was a crisp clarity to existence: good and bad, right and wrong, us and them. This international dualism has returned as the invasion of Ukraine spills over into yet another week, with calls for NATO to enter the war growing louder with each new atrocity and war crime. As in my youth, the world is holding its breath once again, fearful of what might come next.
In high school someone gave me a birthday gift that perfectly captured both the times and my sentiments. It was a yellow Post-It pad, and emblazoned across the top in dark red stencil letters was the tongue-in-cheek warning: “If this gets into the hands of the Russians, it’s curtains for the free world.”
Like most poor country boys, my head was always elsewhere, always dreaming of a life lived outside the confines of our little town, and I absorbed news of the world like oxygen. I longed for other shores.
Meanwhile, as other nerds of the time were playing Dungeons & Dragons, my friends and I were role-playing an entirely different and more topical genre: espionage. The game was called Top Secret.
Rather than playing paladins and elves fighting orcs and goblins we were, instead, spies who set out to rid the world of bad actors; sometimes white supremacists (Operation: Whiteout), sometimes shady bioterrorists (Operation: Seventh Seal) or fanatics (Operation: Lady in Distress), but most often the target of our missions were Cold War foes. And that meant Russians.
In many ways a Cold War is more damaging than a hot one because it endures for so long, inflicting maximum pain on all sides, ensuring that the psychology of the victims is imprinted for the rest of their days with the scars of unremitting conflict, paranoia, and fear.
And yet, somehow, in the midst of all that tension—nuclear missiles in Europe, mass disarmament rallies, the Soviets blowing a Korean passenger jet out of the sky—my worldview began to change.
“Blessed are the peacemakers.” - Matthew 5:9
Her name was Mariko1. Two years younger and hailing from far different socio-economic circles, her path crossed mine in 1985, amid a year of high school drama for the ages. I wrote about her influence on my life in a piece called Infinitely True that remains, to this day, one of the few things I’ve written that still stops my heart.
We spent countless chaste nights, on cold balconies beneath a Maunawili moon, on plush comforters behind hushed shoji doors, where she innocently, yet persistently, explained the truest nature of the world. She spoke of light, love, and the pursuit of peace. In those quiet evenings, when she’d fall asleep on the sofa listening to the sound of my voice, I envisioned the rest of my life becoming something far different. Gone was the hard-edged realism, the one that saw the world in such stark dualist terms. With her, I had opened my heart to the possibilities of something greater than our base impulses.
In time I lost her, of course, as we do with all great loves. But her spirit remained, altering what I believed to be possible. When it was over and the curtain fell on our euphoric drama, I dreamed that we’d surely meet again. That we’d both join the diplomatic corps and find one another in some far off land, the two of us still persistently but no longer innocently guiding the world away from nuclear annihilation, moving it towards peace.
In college, my focus on political science and international relations was aided by a slipstream of professors who provoked and pushed me further on the path towards that dream. There was the gleeful Pakistani teacher’s aide who challenged my view of bipolarity and who argued for a multipolar order; he was Mariko with none of the charm or beauty. There was Dr. Chadwick, who praised my performances in the international crisis simulations, telling me I had a gift for the nuances of diplomacy. My paper on European Economic Integration (“The Coming of the Unholy Alliance”) was so incisive that Professor Mack wondered why I even bothered coming to class.
And, finally, there was the decision to abandon Japanese as my language requirement, to cut short my flirtation with French, and plunge headfirst into learning Russian. I still remember to this day the impish instructor who delighted in saying my name in Russian: Матфей.
“Life’s greatest experience had ended with most of life still to be lived.” ― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
I lost track of Mariko in those intervening years, long before we had tech keeping us so connected that we lack the capacity to yearn. Though there was a fulsome letter one Summer, postmarked Japan, I had no idea where she was in the world until a muggy Tuesday afternoon, on the steps of Kuykendall Hall.
I was rushing to leave campus after another tortured creative writing class when she called my name from the second floor stairwell landing, her shock mirroring my own.
She was different then, returned from abroad and now continuing her studies here at home, her demeanor hardened by experience or time or some other unknowable thing. Her life had changed, her spirit now tamed or focused on something best unsaid. Maybe we were simply older then.
Yet I was so flustered, so unprepared for the rendezvous that I’d dreamed about for years, that when we parted I never asked for her number, nor did I give her mine. There was no way, absent another random encounter, for us to reconnect. I was in a daze for weeks afterward, rendered dizzy by a Universe reprimanding me for failing to recognize that there are no coincidences.
What happened next changed the course of history and, with it, my own destiny. To paraphrase Hemingway: the Soviet Union collapsed gradually, then suddenly. Gone overnight was the belligerent superpower bent on world domination with its nuclear weapons and military bravado, replaced instead by a more open, more engaged, more humble Russia. That they came with hat in hand and on the brink of financial ruin—economics as the motivator rather than a genuine interest in peace—was, in hindsight, a harbinger of what was to come.
As freedom broke out across Eastern Europe, as nations began the long and sometimes bloody journey away from totalitarianism, as the danger to the Free World was diminished, if not erased, there would be no need for a Russian-speaking diplomat who pursued peace above all else. My career as a peacemaker, that dream of saving the world with her, was over.
I went to work in healthcare instead, and the rest is history.
Dream of the Blue Turtles
I think back now to how short-sighted that decision was, abandoning a dream to make the world a better place and to fully engage in international affairs, when history always gets rewritten, both in the past and present tenses. I ponder how things always come back, like bad dreams and old aches, reminding you over and again that despite our best intentions, the world is still a stark place. That the threat of nuclear holocaust has never truly gone away.
Tonight, with expanding Russian aggression in Europe, all it will take is one human error to bring NATO into the war. All it will take is a madman calculating that he can detonate a battlefield nuclear weapon to stave off certain defeat. And the totality of our fears, seemingly lost forty years in the past, will be made manifest.
What kind of world might I have helped to make if I’d stayed on that path? What better world might I have helped to create for my kids and grandkids?
In the same year that I met Mariko and began to dream of a different future for myself, and for the world, Sting released his debut solo album Dream of the Blue Turtles. While other tracks garnered far more attention (If You Love Somebody Set Them Free, Fortress Around Your Heart), I was always drawn to the haunting melody and lyrics of Russians, a moody yet operatic plea for that better world I was only beginning to visualize.
Then, as now, our greatest hope to avoid escalating conflict and certain world war rests in the hope that the Russians are like us; that we are all at our core simply people who want to fall in love, to raise families, and to be with our friends. That the artificial things separating us, the lines on maps and the differences in our tongues, cannot overpower the deep humanity we feel towards those we hold close in our hearts and in our memories. That we collectively dream of a better world.
That, as Sting so plaintively sang, “I hope the Russians love their children, too.”
Not her real name, of course.