I Wonder.... Romanian revolutionaries

I have dedicated my next book called, PUSH! The Sequel to the brave, revolutionary young families of the Muntele Rece district of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Against all odds they are taking back control of their lives and the lives of their children after Communism all but dictated their very existence. They are choosing to have their babies at home, later home schooling them, and discovering autonomy for themselves, all currently banned and illegal by law.

  It reminds me so very much of the 1960s and ’70s in America when radical hippies like Ina May and Stephen Gaskin began to question the status quo. They deserve our deepest respect and support. I can only guess that the advent of the Internet in their little villages found a willing audience in these young people. They are educated, seeking souls, so very ready for change, and when they discovered what the rest of the world has been up to until now, they ran with it. But I am curious: why weren't they attracted to our materialism, or our free market economies and consumerism instead?

 I have gotten to know many young immigrant families over the years and many of them want everything and anything that smacks of America, even at the expense of forgoing their forefathers' traditions and way of life. They strike me as even more American than we are, in a way, hankering after the very arrogance we enshrine. But this is different. The Romanian revolutionaries are peacefully considering all their options and the direction they will choose for themselves. I wonder how do they choose among all of the innovative movements they encounter while being inundated with  the glut of information the Internet has to offer? This is epic, in my eyes.  

    

I have only the highest respect and regard for this tiny movement among them. They are slowly winning midwives, doctors, and others over to their side. Their network spans the whole of the former Communist bloc countries: Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, whose foreign policies depended on those of the former Soviet Union.






"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist...destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

 ~ Thomas Merton, (1915 – 1968), Trappist monk, author

Stay tuned for my next books, PUSH! The Sequel: 37 more true stories from midwives and doulas and, Stone Age Babies in a Space Age World: Babies and Bonding in the 21st Century.