PANEL THREE:
EVERYDAY LIFE AND THE POLITICAL CONTEST

...The only thing I can do is give you my own ideas and share my own experience. And I'm going to repeat here again that I've never been, I'm not, and I hope I never will be a political activist. First of all, I have been a professor of philosophy and a pastor, and now only the latter, as a bishop, and as such, I have defined my task: to respond in the Christian way to questions posed by life...

Once in one of my sermons, I said, "We are being accused of opposing the government of the Polish People's Republic. No, I'm not in opposition to the government but the government is in opposition to the society, by using force to introduce atheism."

As research has documented, an average Pole at the end of the 80's focused primarily on organizing his own private life and on material issues. Socio-political problems, such as, for instance, doubts concerning the mismanagement of the country or the economic crisis were, for a majority of Poles, only a marginal issue, remaining in the background of everyday life. Because at that time, when asked the question, "What is crucial right now for your family, what issues would you like to take care of first of all and what are your main goals?," those surveyed would indicate such things as an apartment, over fifty-one percent, family and private life, financial situation, with almost thirty percent of respondents. And it was only the fourth position where the situation in the country was mentioned by merely thirteen percent of respondents...

In the political struggle of the 80's, I can say that, to my knowledge, political demands were to a considerable degree a result of everyday, economic frustrations. The propaganda of success generated by the political authorities gradually contributed to higher and higher material aspirations and expectations in the Polish society. At the same time, the deepening crisis caused the ability of the government to meet those expectations to gradually diminish. And thus, the lack of balance between the material needs and expectations of the society and the life conditions that the system could provide turned out to be one of the main causes of the protests in the 80's. And what pushed people towards struggle were not so much objective material problems as the gap between expectations, aroused by propaganda, and the actual availability of goods.

In 1981, in November, farmers...organized a big protest demonstration at Siedlice, and one of the demands was to allow them to buy rubber shoes, more than two pairs, and lard. Hardly anyone knows about that, but when food was rationed, farmers were not given coupons, in fact. Those things are practically, well, we can't really understand those things today how that group, that class, was being discriminated against throughout all that time...

In the Polish rural areas there was practically...unilateral support for the new order. And great expectations indeed connected with it. I could ask you, ladies and gentlemen, directly, what forced the government side to enter those Round Table negotiations. Just as it happened during previous crises...Of course, I don't want to oversimplify, but I want to show this as a real problem. It was the issue of providing food for the Poles, since every Polish crisis was in fact accompanied by empty store shelves...

During the Round Table negotiations, to us, well, in what is now the Presidential Palace, there were farmers in front of the palace demonstrating, farmers demonstrating, demanding good pay. Ten years later, in February of this year, as you know, Poland was shaken by peasant protests, well, on a scale unheard of for the past seventy years. There is something symbolic about this, since then, there, at the Round Table, we tried, well, unsuccessfully, as it has turned out, but we tried to solve the economic problems, especially those of the farmers. And now, ten years later, the same problem is coming back magnified, and it still remains unsolved. And that's a great challenge that's ahead of us, all those Poles who look seriously at their duties toward the Polish nation. This means that we will have to tackle the problem of the Polish farmers and we'll have to solve it for the good of the farmers, but also for the good of the whole Polish society...

Among parts of the opposition, there was a fear of taking over. Among the rural types like myself...we were used to working on our own, to normal entrepreneurship and so forth. We never lost completely this kind of responsibility, which...not to put down the working class, but they functioned differently. They were supposed to obey orders, you know. They would think less; I'm sorry, you know, I don't mean to put anybody down. In order to survive as individual farmers, we had to think, figure out some tricks, to say informally. Therefore, we were not afraid of running things...

As a man, well, let's call it a hundred percent Solidarity man, I am experiencing personally, and very acutely, the huge problem of the departure from Solidarity of the community I'm representing, and that is the rural community...

It's something incredible that the most powerful, peaceful movement in that part of Europe that has changed the face of contemporary world is unable to find its place in this contemporary world! But I believe, and I am an optimist, that we will find it and we will enter the twenty-first century with a new force, the force that would stem, above all, from Solidarity and from the social teachings of the Church. And these are the two major tasks that we have to carry.

...Any interviews that had been recorded during the Round Table negotiations, the interviews recorded by regime journalists, as we called them then, were attended by our own journalists who would record everything and then we would check which sections of the interview had been cut out, so, with this breathing on their necks, they had to produce decent, substantive, well done reports. Besides, we also wanted the viewers to know when Zakrzewski, the regime journalist, spoke to a member of the OPZZ (government unions) or a person from Solidarity. And here I have to say immodestly that this was my idea. We had three folders with the Solidarity logo, so everybody from our side who was being interviewed on television would hold that folder like this. And it became clear, since otherwise nobody would be able to identify that person as a member of Solidarity or the opposition and not a person from OPZZ. That's what this moment was like...

At the Round Table negotiations we didn't even dream that what has happened would happen, that so soon we would have free mass media. One of those colleagues of mine who participated at the press "small table" said, and I won't quote it here exactly, that he hoped that perhaps in two years underground publications would probably become legal. We were simply counting on the end of repression against underground publications. And, of course, the way Polish society behaved during the elections surprised all of us, I mean the election results. And we, journalists, I think owe particularly much to all this because what happened was exactly what we had been fighting for. Thanks to that we have completely free mass media right now and we may write according to our conscience. However, completely new and also quite restrictive conditions arose, but those phenomena are close to the world in which we are here right now. It's a certain commercialism, a certain dependence on centers, perhaps no longer political,...but perhaps to some extent political, but primarily on money...

...One of my male friends from the opposition said to me in a conversation at one point that we should erect a monument dedicated to the women of martial law, because that entire network of conspiracy, all of this rested on the shoulders of the women...

The Solidarity that we were directly involved in and felt so emotional about was a creation of a certain era, a certain time, and perhaps it cannot easily be transferred to today, as reality has demonstrated...

The period of the Round Table was very interesting, very important, also because it allowed us to look at the opponents, at the partners, and get to know them. And this is when the links were created, and they were quite necessary in order to perceive those people differently and try to understand their motivation, their way of thinking. And on the other hand, those Round Table negotiations marked the beginning of a process which brought to an end this period of direct democracy when people still had direct impact on their trade union authorities and on the opposition authorities. And a new period started which, I am afraid, today has resulted in a certain deafness to social protests.

Next Panel Four: Political and Ethical Responsibility

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