Friends of project Plzeň

Wed. Sept. 7. 2011

Dear Friend:

I deeply regret I cannot wedge out the time to write each and every person on my list a personl letter. To complicate things I have run up against a computer-printer problem that has made my life hell for the last 10 days. We always think electronic problems can be solved quickly and painlessly because we are surrounded by tech wizzards. But it turns out over and over that is an illusion. So in desperation I am writing this at the public library....not at home on my computer-printer.

But the letter below will be self-explanatory. I am also going to attach something I read today that strikes me as ironic beyond words as it is at the very heart, if not soul, of what my new book, Wilson's Exile, is all about. And why I wrote it. And why I decided one year ago I was going to make this cross country trip one last time....Come hell or high water.

Again, forgive me for having to send out a circular letter. I regret and apologise the photos of the Freedom Book lack the quality I hoped for so you could see what your photos and that of others as they appear in person.

Roger

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

To all my old Friends:

I regret time and situation doesn't allow for a personal letter to each person on my list. At this point I am in a contest with time to get my vehicle ready and other loose ends on this end tied up so as to take to the road. The road being that much delayed cross country tour that I've been planning since last September.

It does no harm to remind you what this is all about. Some years ago, following the 1989 revolution that evicted the communists from their clutch over the people of Eastern Europe, I arrived in what was then Czechoslovakia to teach English in a high school in the city of Plzen. In 1994 I started a non-profit organization, Project Plzen, to build an American Library in Plzen. To my way of thinking it would be on the one hand a gift to the people of that region to repay the fact at a critical moment of history in 1945 we turned them over to the Russian Red Army. It was also to honor all of the American solders of the 3rd Army who had liberated Plzen in May, 1945.

What propelled me to Eastern Europe in the first place was the fact that when I first dedicated myself to the idea of becoming a writer I was still in the Army and stationed at a small refugee camp in West Germany. There I came face to face with every kind of refugee from every country in Eastern Europe. I decided at that point I wanted to be a writer to defend and give voice to those who were exploited by the powerful and silenced by the inhuman.

So for decades my mind was focused on what was happing behind the Iron Curtain, that barrier the communists had erected between East and West.

But as time passed I couldn't ignore the front included America: how could anyone possibly miss the growing numbers - many veterans from the Vietnam war - of homeless in the streets or the swelling masses of Americans without health insurance - which often led to their homelessness - and the growing and ever present numbers of Americans who worked at sub-living wages or the schools which I worked in which often did little but mass produce functional illiterates? But I never saw myself as a writer like Sinclair Lewis. I saw myself as a writer who traveled to the fronts in the world where people were imprisoned by barbed wire, stone walls, guards ordered to shoot first, and secret police who terrorized ordinary people. These were the people I felt compelled to give voice to and defend.

I still try to live by the code once a man gives his word to something it's a commitment that ends only after he has fulfilled his given word. So the library is still my first obligation. But in the 20 plus years that the Czech Republic and the other nations of Eastern Europe have recovered their freedom the world has taken an odd twist. Now my native land has become a nation in peril of falling into those condemned nations of failed states. It seems nothing we have taken for granted about this country as we were growing up can be believed in today. Not our money, not our justice system, not our elections, not our schools, not our energy delivery systems, not even what some consider most valuable of all, our good name, which used to be the one thing an American abroad could depend upon. We were thought to be iron clad and steel willed when it came to fair play.

The bare truth is just as the Eastern Europeans took to the streets and threw out their corrupt regimes the same must happen here so we can be brought into the 21st century on the same basis as all the advanced countries we must compete against in health care, education, and culture.

Thus there is a need because I am a writer, with a track record that extends for over 40 years, for me to go out to the American Front and talk to the people. To offer hope where I can, to listen to broken dreams and bring solace to aching hearts, this and only this is what a writer is good for. In truth I have warned and written of these things in my books and stories for the last 40 years. I found

-2-

I was easily ignored by the powers that be. I was treated as some kind of scold. And even now when I read the establishment press and the inside the belt way types I find their prescription for the nation's problems is more of the same which is what got us where we are in the first place. It is as if the cries of pain from the jobless millions and the hopeless cannot be heard. It reminds me of something the Nobel Prize winning Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard's graduation exercise in 1978:

"There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events."

In 1978 he was talking mainly about Eastern Europe and other communist controlled countries. But reading his classic speech today one would think he was talking about America. How strange that history has reversed the places of the dispossessed from the righteous.

So it is time for me to travel to where people are suffering at home. Least one think this pain is only to be found in far away places and not in all of our backyards, I found this letter in my local newspaper, the Tri-City Herald, yesterday

"What's absent today from the America of my younger days is hope and understanding that we were all one nation and that together we would make it better. Perhaps it was just naiveté. Today, America is like an alien country, a nation led by deceit and hypocrisy, of rampant greed, of sociopathic disdain for the lives of others, and a story of complete betrayal and the predatory exploitation of innocent people as we squander the last of our economy on wars and irresponsible short-term gains for the greedy...."

Don Clark, Richland

Without knowing the age of the writer it is hard to say what he means by his "younger days." But the use of the word alien stands out. Alien is something foreign and unknown. I think there are millions of American today who feel trapped in an alien place. And because those of power and influence refuse to listen to them I sense only "the pitiless crowbar of events will piece the petrified armor of their minds."

I'm asking each of my old friends to help me with this effort by buying a copy of my new book Wilson's Exile, which I'll be carrying with me to sell and fund raise for Project Plzen. All I can add to what you will read on the press release is that this is a book you'll get your money's worth on - and then some.

I will be writing and posting a blog so you can follow my journey complete with a map and photographs. In a sense you can travel along with me and meet the people I meet. And hear their stories. I believe this is a struggle that involves every man for when the everyday man is exploited and stripped of his hope of making a decent living we are all in a sense impoverished and stripped of our rights. So I hope you will see what I am doing is fighting your fight as well. As you know the price of gasoline is roughly three times what it was in 1997 the last time I made this cross country journey to raise funds for Project Plzen. So you can have a direct hand in making this effort a success.(Find attached an order form.)

Sincerely,

Roger Burke