the last good year

the last good year


fiction
edward w pritchard

Vienna March 1938

Tall and straight, wide shouldered young soldiers with blue eyes stared confidently Eastward. They rode on motorcycles with side seats, in Dusenberg touring cars, or marched with high steps into Vienna, Austria in the Anschluss, on March 13, 1938.

The radio announcer was one of us. Speaking like a sad older brother he told us it was useless to resist the Nazi soldiers marching triumphantly into Vienna. The radio announcer said that no matter how many times we had promised to speak out or stick together, this time it was different because the Nazi's were different. It was useless for us to resist. We had a long history in Austria of dealing with conquerors. Why then did we cry that day? To cover our tears our radio station, ours for a few more days, played our music; Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Sad and poignant.

We stayed in our homes as the Nazi troops entered Vienna. We shut the doors and the windows. True not everyone of us were inside that day. Some were on the roads cheering the Nazi's in an outburst of Germanic patriotism. The Western press in Britain, France and America said we all cheered. Later no Austrians cheered, Vienna a jewel of Western civilization died a little that day in 1938. The death of Vienna however had started earlier, at our peak, the top of our ascendancy in 1899. It took a while for us to hit bottom there in 1938 when the Nazi's came in, but we drifted lower and lower from 1899 and that day in 1938, that our music, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played was the bottom of our fall from grace as one of the leaders of Western culture and civilization.

America- 1999

Our fears refused to stay submerged. First was the furor over Y2K, the transition to the millennium. Then an open wound, 09-11-2001. Lastly financial terror, a housing crisis in 2008, and rampant Wall Street scandals and moral-less banker behavior over and over. Something was wrong with our culture and our country. Our homes were being invaded, not by a foreign enemy but by ourselves and our fears.

In America our covetous nature, our acquisitiveness and our greed had propelled us to the top of the world since 1899. Now we stayed in our homes and retreated inward. We were invaded but we couldn't determine by whom.

Some of us Americans, those on reservations knew about invasions, what it was like to be conquered by superior forces. To lose their ascendancy and have their way of life disappear. But the American Indians had no health insurance and were busy carrying water and couldn't say; their last good year was 1599, before we came from Europe. The memory of conquerors was more recent with those Americans.

Over the next ten years after 1999, more and more Americans retreated inward and worried about just their own survival or obsessed about retirement. Optimism was deflating. We stayed in our homes and closed the doors and windows. Our last good year was past and history was moving on. We weren't conquered just slipping backward. Something had changed in America after 1999 but we couldn't articulate it. It was someone Else's turn to have the good years.

Turn on our old radio station one more time before it's all gone. Turn on to our old music and listen to our old songs. Think one more time of our shared values.

Let the young endlessly and mundanely text each other of their hourly movements, minute by minute. Next hours meal plans and last hours tribulations. Let us listen to the old marching songs and remember the last good year while we can.

History marches on. Our time as lead actor on the stage is gone, blowing in the wind somewhere. Pick some wild flowers- for flower power, go to San Fransisco once more in an old Volkswagen bus- for the movement of the people, then let's turn our blurry eyes skyward one more time and listen to the beat of the old music one more time. Where lurks our unfinished symphony?
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