Mykola ZHULYNSKY: “I’ve never felt like a heroic person”

Mykola Zhulynsky, member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences and director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature has a shopping list of titles and a mountain of scholarly publications to his name. Twice deputy premier for humanitarian affairs, he has consistently tried to change life in this country for the better, always insisting on the priority of human values. Is this a realistic goal?

The Day: A memorial plaque dedicated to Vasyl Stus was unveiled in Donetsk. We live in the same country, yet we learned about it from you; there has been nothing in the media. Does it mean nobody needs to know?

M. Z.: Perhaps our institute is also to blame. We are in a tight spot financially, so we cannot always afford to advertise our projects. The plaque was placed on the wall of the former history and philology department of the Donetsk Teachers College (currently Donetsk National University) where he had studied. It was a significant event for Ukraine and for Donetsk oblast, because accepting Stus required certain efforts by many in that region; they had to accept a new ideological reality. For many Stus was a nationalist and the notion had a definite negative connotation. I’m personally distressed to watch our authorities learn the new rules of the game so quickly, at almost all levels. The Soviet system taught them mimicry. People of the older generation, who hold important posts, are used to living and working while playing an ideological game, observing certain rituals, whether or not they actually believe in them. Regrettably, such rituals are still practiced in independent Ukraine, as a necessary way to adapt to the new political system. I think that many events taking place in the east and west of Ukraine are rituals rather than consciously required ones. Still, the Stus plaque in Donetsk is a special signal and the regional and city authorities played an important role in the project. It is even symbolic. If our society perceived the Stus phenomenon we would understand many things. He lived and worked in Donetsk oblast, a totally Russified area. He was born in Vinnytsia oblast. He came to Kyiv and enrolled in the Institute of Literature as a graduate student, and entered the environment of the sixties movement. It was then he became a convinced Ukrainian patriot and came into conflict with the Soviet regime. He had a special awareness of his own dignity, human as well as national.

As a graduate student he was arrested. I lived and worked in Leningrad at the time and I realized what was happening at the institute only when I entered its graduate program. By that time Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Stus, Yury Badzio, and Ivan Dziuba had been arrested; Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska had been released. What was left was a refined Communist-oriented institute, used by the Communist Party of Ukraine Central Committee as chief censor of literature. That’s how we lived. I was frustrated but did nothing, and I still feel guilty.

The Day: When unveiling the Stus plaque, did you feel that your were repaying some of your own debts?

M. Z.: I’ve never felt like a heroic person, perhaps I was not prepared to do anything that way. Watching movies about World War II, I find myself thinking I might have deserted. Looking back at those years, I realize that I never lived a normal life but struggled to survive. Postwar childhood was being constantly hungry. There were seven children in the family and only our mother to take care of us. Strange as it may seem, I don’t like tilling the soil. I’m still horrified to remember having to dig over those 50 sotka (1 sotka = 10 square meters). Then I would eye all those weeds, equally horrified. Then there was our cow to feed. I practically attended no classes from the eighth to tenth grades, for I had to go looking for firewood every morning, so mother could light the stove and cook. In the evening I had to get hay for the cow. The only way to get it was by stealing it from the local collective farm. Such was the cruel reality. Then my older brother arranged for me to enroll in the teachers college in Dubno. The only reason I could study there was because the college needed a brass band, so the students could march down the main street on November 7 to celebrate the October Revolution. After graduation, I was assigned to the school in the village of Ozersk, Dubrovytskia district, Rivne oblast. There was no electricity, no radio, no newspapers, no club, just a huge lake, and all the villagers had three last names: Sirko, Pliashko, and Petrovych. I worked for two years, but I wanted to get out, of course, and do something in terms of a career. I wanted to be a writer or journalist, but this required Party membership. I went to Lutsk and had to adapt myself to the urban way of life. I learned to dance the Charleston, wear tight pants (peeling them off would always leave me sweating), and talk to girls in Russian, pretending to be a city boy.

The Day: How did you become a member of the academy?

M. Z. : Honestly, I don’t know. I went to Leningrad, because I wanted to study there. I spent a month looking for job and found none, because I was not registered as a city resident. Then I somehow got a job at a shipyard and worked there for three years. I think that Leningrad gave me a kind of self-education. I worked hard, yet I’d go to the philharmonic society or theater whenever I could. I would go to the Mariyinsky Theater to hear an opera almost every Sunday. I would sit in the audience, unimpressed and trying not to doze off (my eyes were heavy and watery from electric welding). But I still went there and to exhibits and philharmonic concerts. The people in the audience were all so respectable, so emotionally engrossed, and there I sat listening and understanding nothing. But I told myself if they could feel something, so, with time, would I. Naturally, I had no musical education. I explored all the Leningrad museums several times over, pausing by every canvas. I read a lot and visited the historic suburbs: Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Pushkin... I studied world culture with a muzhik’s persistence and finally came close to understanding it, although I remained a neophyte in a lot of fields, as did so many of my generation. The need to survive, adjust oneself to circumstances that one can do nothing about, an ability to find a way out of any situation, to know where and when to keep one’s mouth shut and do as told — all this is the Communist system and the way of life and thinking enforced by it. Actually, we have no full-fledged national elite. Most of our writers and artists are people from the countryside who were unable to receive a good education. They graduated from universities, but were products of a deformed ideologized system of learning denying one the possibility to think independently and develop one’s own inner world.

Getting back to Vasyl Stus. I think he never actually prepared himself for political activity; he didn’t see himself as a dissident; he wanted to fulfill himself as a creative person, cultivating himself as a Ukrainian intellectual thinking at the European and world level. Imagine, while in a concentration camp, he learned German and English. He read Rilke, Camus, and many other philosophers in the original. Stus’s letters to his son were an attempt to cultivate in the boy solid cultural and spiritual foundations. Without them our society will have no future. We have the traditional spiritual-cultural “resources” and capabilities to form a Ukrainian civilization as a cultural organism, as a society that would be interesting to the rest of the world. As for the problems of globalization, I for one do not regard them as an unequivocal phenomenon. We cannot interpret it as integration into transnational economic and financial systems where we wouldn’t be in the vanguard, of course. We would be lucky to find ourselves somewhere in the middle. But even then we would have to be intellectually equipped, spiritually fortified, and have a solid cultural basis. After decades of isolation we are prepared to throw all the doors open. But how do we do it? How well are we prepared for a dialogue with, and the challenges of, Western civilization, American culture, and all that information onslaught on our minds, especially the younger generation? I was appointed to my first government post when the first video rental clubs appeared. Many complained about the illegal and legal propaganda of violence and sex that pounced on our unprepared youth. What will all this lead to? Let’s ban all of it! I remember my first visit to the States in 1978. I headed for 42nd Street, holding a couple of bucks, to watch a porno film. I walked and looked around anxiously lest I bump into someone I knew. I bought a ticket, stepped inside and saw people chewing something, drinking, and kissing. I mean they were totally relaxed. Then the movie started and what I saw made me red with shame, I kept squirming in my seat. But I did go there: I did want to see that movie. We had to undergo that trial. On the other hand, a decade has passed, and it’s time to put things right legally, even if one step at a time. We need a purposeful cultural policy, we need a system of national values and priorities, a system of ideological coordinates and guidelines; we must know where we are headed and what we are after.

The Day: You have on more than one occasion stressed that humanitarian policy must be made a priority. Was there anything you could do in that direction while you were in the government?

M. Z.: The first time I began to work in the government maybe I wasn’t ready, but I’m a workaholic, I like work, and I put my heart into the job. I was a state adviser for humanitarian policy with the State Duma of Ukraine that existed for less than a year. A humanitarian policy board was set up. It included noted figures from all over Ukraine. We started to work out a concept of Ukrainian humanitarian development, relying on the human development index. It actually determines the civil status of any society under a UN program. A seminar was held in 1993, for the first time involving the post-Soviet states. Among others, it was addressed by Leonid Kuchma, then Prime Minister. The National Academy together with the Institute for Strategic Studies proceeded to work out methods to determine the parameters to define the human development index. We could not embrace all the parameters envisioned by the UN, but even then I said that we had to proceed from a whole complex of factors, particularly the status of education, culture, science, health care, and ecological situation. But then the State Duma was dissolved, and we couldn’t finish the project. When I became Vice Premier I tried to continue work in that direction, but my contacts with members of the government and parliament made it clear that they did appreciate my endeavors but sometimes regarded me as a countryside philosopher, like Mykolaichuk’s hero in the movie Babylon XX. In other words, there had to be someone like me occupying my post. So let it be something akin to ritual, nothing more. To expect someone to establish this as a priority of the state, government, or Verkhovna Rada anytime in the near future would be very naive.

A lot of reform-minded thinkers visited Ukraine from abroad at the time, they wanted to show us how to make reforms in our economy and society. The question was whether to carry out the market reform energetically, reducing the number of institutions of learning, making most students pay for their tuition, and instituting paid health care. In other words, we were being offered the Latin American option. I said there would be no reductions as long as I held my post. You can make your reforms, make our economy a market one, and then we’ll make reforms in the humanitarian sphere. I often quote from Nobel laureate Hajek’s Road to Slavery; it’s an excellent work, and the author convincingly proves that reforms in a society with a planned economy are an extremely complicated and long process. It is possible only if a business, financial, industrial, and administrative elite takes shape and becomes aware of itself as a nationally responsible and patriotic one. Leonid Kuchma was all set to carry out the reforms. Yukhnovsky was first vice premier and Pynzenyk was vice premier and minister of the economy... It was a mobile and hard-working team, prepared to make dynamic reforms in the whole system. So what happened? Remember all those countless cabinet decrees? Six months passed and nothing changed. Those decrees were like stones thrown down a well, trying to figure out its depth. Not a sound. The decrees were good, but society was not prepared for the reforms, the more so that the Red managers were in their prime and paid little attention to what was decided from above.

I managed to get Ivan Dziuba the culture minister’s portfolio. And it was hard talking him into accepting it. But finally Drach, Pavlychko, and I did. Dziuba set about working out the concept of Ukraine’s cultural policy, relying on the experience of the world’s best models: British, French, and American. We would often consult in the evening, trying to figure out our model, in order that it would retain the structure we already had and allow agencies and funds to operate. We needed a law on benevolent associations. We drafted a bill and Verkhovna Rada edited out most of what it had to offer. After Leonid Kuchma won the presidency Tabachnyk was assigned the task of shaping cadre policy. Did this mean he would give orders to Dziuba? So the model we worked out had no time to start working. I was offered my second governmental post by the Yushchenko team. I told him I had held the post and wasn’t overexcited, and that I would accept on one condition: a humanitarian priority in the national policy. The individual had to come first, his development, social protection, the economy being a means of protecting man’s rights, interests, and needs, because reforms are made for the sake of people.

The Day: And then Yuliya Tymoshenko came first with her fuel and energy sector and everything else came second, for everything was subordinated to the energy priorities, the ones Viktor Yushchenko actually pursued, not the ones he discussed in friendly conversation. But suppose we broach the subject of book publishing and trade in Ukraine. The status of both is alarming. Governmental posts were held by people whose patriotism caused no doubt. Ivan Dziuba and Bohdan Stupka as ministers of culture, respected as they always have been, failed to convince the general public that professional patriots can make professional managers, because they could not change the situation. Consider one figure. Russia publishes ten times more books than Ukraine, and our distributors prefer to deal with Russian books. Why?

M. Z.: There’s no denying the fact. Even as members of the Kuchma cabinet, we worked out a national policy meant to support the domestic producer, including renovation at the Zhydachiv Paper and Pulp Combine, creating a domestic paper supply system, and providing the required printing basis, so our books would become competitive; we worked out the legal framework to attach priority to the national publisher and supplier of information products. The program was adopted, but it was not financed even by 30%. I was a member of parliament and helped pass the bill on book publishing. Frankly, the document was far from perfect even then. Then it was “trimmed” at various stages of parliamentary deliberation and finally passed. It still doesn’t work. In Russia, they did it with precision and clarity. The president signed an edict exempting the entire book publishing and distribution system from taxes. After that the Duma passed a bill confirming and expanding the tax concessions.

In 2000, we prepared amendments allowing the domestic publishers to work in conditions similar to those in Russia. Verkhovna Rada refused to pass the bill in that wording. The cabinet could be reproached for failing to come to terms with parliament. This is regarded as the main reason for its fall. Yet solving a single issue took half one’s workday, visiting offices, arguing your case, and asking for favors. I just can’t make myself ask for any favors. It’s no excuse, of course, for I knew what I was up to when accepting my government post; I knew I would have to knock on parliamentary doors. Unless we have a democratic majority in parliament, one that forms a cabinet that will in turn cooperate with lawmakers on terms of full confidence and understanding, the situation will continue to retard our progress.

The Day: Doesn’t it seem to you that one factor retarding our reforms, particularly those in the cultural sphere, is that a sizable part of our political elite does not have particular cultural needs?

M. Z.: While it is true that not all members of the government can write resolutions without making grammatical mistakes or do not frequent the theater, this isn’t the problem. The problem might be that these people have no cultural need to do so; they will go to the theater, of course, if they know that the president will be there. But one should not reproach our political and financial elite for this only. Work in the government is always at a head-spinning rate, the schedule is severe, and people really don’t have much time left for anything else, but the biggest problem is that most of us are marginal people, raised on so-called Soviet culture, while under normal conditions we ought to be dominated by our own national culture, national spiritual tradition as that basis on which we will perceive and partake of European and world culture... From this arises the scorn toward the Ukrainian language, being afraid or reluctant to show one’s national sentiments, honor, and dignity... Marginality is the inevitable victim of globalization. It’s being doomed to a second-rate status and loss of one’s national visage.

The Day: Another system of coordinates could have been worked in our recent history, in which our weak points would not look so grotesque and our strong points would be enhanced. This applies also to the cultural sphere. Without our bitter experience under the Russian tsarist and Soviet empires, we actually don’t know what to show the rest of the world except for our folk heritage. Would you give us some examples of a new emancipated Ukraine?

M. Z.: I don’t quite agree. We possess a unique spiritual and cultural potential. The trouble is that we don’t have powerful financial mechanisms to translate our cultural values into the world. We have an excellent highly professional theatrical culture, fine arts, sculpture, poetry, and such. We are a very talented nation and we have very few governmental or other forms and means to support all this, to launch such gifted people into their own creative orbits. We are haunted by an inferiority complex. Visiting Moscow performers, nothing special, just passable in terms of box office, find eager audiences in Ukraine, while our own talent is ignored. Regrettably, we haven’t been able to fully implement our national potential in the last decade. We have done very little. This pains me. Honestly, I consider my four years in Verkhovna Rada an almost complete waste of time. What is there to remember? Endless trips to Lutsk, meetings with the electorate, with people asking to help repair their roofs, install a telephone line, or arrange for them to have false teeth. I am a disciplined man and never missed sessions in parliament, but again it was mostly wasting time. On the other hand, I do not regret working in the Yushchenko cabinet. We did accomplish something. I’m convinced that Ukraine is facing a serious turning point. A new generation is taking over with a new way of thinking. I met with young people in Lviv, leaders of the Movement for Truth. They want an open society, fair political system, an open dialogue with those in power. And the powers that be are afraid of it. These young people are well aware that everything is for sale, that our politics is based mostly on lies. Cynicism, egotism, trying to elbow one’s way to the top at any cost, acting contrary to basic moral dictates — all this is very depressing. The younger generation realizes that one must be tough and cruel, stepping over dead bodies, if one wants to achieve something; the weak will never survive. Still, I believe that the process of transforming this society, slow as it is, will bear fruit.

The Day: Your constituents’ expectations are quite understandable; they want their deputy to help them right here and now. They ask no questions about the shortcomings of current legislation but want something specific done for them. It means that a lot is still to be reformed within. Things debated in official Kyiv for the past ten years are not even known in the provinces, for example, the unification of churches. There were various responses to the papal visit. You were among those supporting the idea, for it was a way to make Ukraine part of the process of civilization, yet you were not seen during the festivities in Kyiv. Was it because you no longer worked for the government?

M. Z.: I visited the Patriarch of Constantinople on President Kravchuk’s instructions to persuade him to take part in the church unification process. I constantly said that we had to invite the pontiff to visit Ukraine. I was even supposed to preside over the organizing committee, but the president changed that, maybe because I am not in favor with the Moscow Patriarchate. The committee was chaired by Foreign Minister Zlenko, because the visit was now a top-level official event. I was not invited to attend various festivities in Kyiv, but went to Lviv on my own. I attended the conference and met with young people. I was invited by the Polish, not Ukrainian side.

I’ll tell you one thing. It’s hard for me to carry on polemics with you because we take the same stand on many issues. After all, when the struggle for the restructuring and independence of Ukraine began the whole society looked to Verkhovna Rada. Our mentality developed a stereotype such that we believed that everything was decided there. This is correct in principle, for they are the lawmakers and Ukraine’s future depends on them. Then we switched to the presidential vector. In fact, we have two governments, one on Bankova and one on Hrushevsky Street. People can’t understand who orders whom. The man in the street does not know who is in charge of what. I’ve started writing a book on how our public consciousness and society was formed under the Communist regime. I decided to begin with a village scene. There was a big pole in front of the village council with a huge dish of an old loudspeaker attached. No one in the village subscribes to newspapers and everybody listens to the radio. We hear the familiar “This is Radio Moscow” and everybody is silent waiting to hear about retail price reductions or amnesty. At the time the two subjects were uppermost in everyone’s mind. Of course, nobody could ask the radio a question, so it was one-way communication. But the situation has basically not changed since then. People listen to what Verkhovna Rada has to say. Well, they may spit and curse at what they hear. Then their deputy will visit them, and they’ll tell him what they think of him and his like in parliament and where he and his like can do with their resolutions. What about all those people’s deputies that don’t visit their constituencies for six months? Who can these people complain to? I think that this single vector signal is clearly used by many our political parties. There is actually no public influence on the authorities. What kind of civil society can we expect under the circumstances?

The Day: The issue of reconciliation of those on both sides of the barricades during World War II remains open. We have the Spanish experience, for example, where every effort was made to keep a nation that went through a severe confrontation in one piece.

M. Z.: Franco was a man of strong will and always goal oriented. He was also clever and, although he ruled Spain as a dictator, he preserved the royal status. He proclaimed reconciliation of the warring sides for the sake of posterity, thus opening the road to the future. I’ve made repeated attempts to reconcile the war veterans but realized that the gap between them is too deep. While in Volyn and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts (my constituencies), they did start to communicate, this very idea is unacceptable in the eastern ones. Do you know what made me join the five-sided bloc of the Liberal Party of Ukraine and Labor Party? They said I could be the bridge spanning eastern and western Ukraine. This made me agree, hoping I would be able to do something to get the process of rapprochement moving. I im not a militant, and I don’t like conflict, protests, or accusations. I also think that many on both the Left and Right have learned this paradigm and constantly utilize it. Or take some of the emotional rightists; they start not with what I have accomplished but with who is to blame. I’m not talking about the Left. This is perhaps why the UPA still awaits rehabilitation, and there is no objective basic concept of the national liberation struggle. The Soviet ideological stereotypes refuse to die, and that struggle for Ukrainian freedom and independence is perceived through the Communist propaganda image of all those Bandera adherents, instilled in our minds for decades. Banderophobia is characteristic of not only Russia, as Igor Losev writes, but also of Ukraine, especially in the east. This situation cannot be changed by a presidential edict, but Verkhovna Rada must pass a bill rehabilitating UPA and establishing its war veteran status.

The Day: What do you think of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, church unification, and canonization?

M. Z.: I used to be more optimistic. I thought that Metropolitan Volodymyr and his Moscow Patriarchate church would take at least some steps to offer an opportunity for dialogue. The papal visit and preparations were convincing evidence that that such a dialogue cannot be expected in the near future. They can’t act against themselves, just as they can’t act against the Moscow Patriarchate. After two meetings with Patriarch Bartholomew, I realized that the Ecumenical Patriarch wants no confrontation with Moscow, for this would, in his opinion, hurt the whole Orthodox world. However, owing to the Kyiv Patriarchate’s insistent efforts and the Ecumenical Patriarch’s initiative, efforts are being made to find a starting point for understanding. I think that John Paul II’s visit to Ukraine gave the process a strong impetus, for it showed that the Vatican lays no claims to any Orthodox territories but is looking for ways to reach an understanding between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the name of peace in Europe. I also think that our Orthodox hierarchs show a very low cultural standard at all levels. Many are afflicted with the same disease as our oligarchs, determined to build a fortune at any price, retain their posts and attendant benefits. Why can’t we sit down and calmly discuss our living in the same country, being one Orthodox nation but remaining divided. Why? There is also Moscow which is interested in holding onto what it considers its own canonical territory.

I think that we have just wasted too much time. We could have accomplished this when Patriarch Mstyslav was still alive. At the time no one thought about a canonical, noncanonical, or autocephalous church, simply because people didn’t even know the terms. Now the issue is being increasingly atomized, and there is little the government can do, except that it should stay out of the whole thing.

The Day: You were among the initiators of the orthographic reform, which has caused so much controversy in our society. What is it current status?

M. Z.: I fell prey to my own openness. I could never expect the matter to cause so many political speculations, sarcastic and ironic media responses, most primitive and unprofessional. I thought we would have a normal debate, and this would serve to increase public interest in the Ukrainian language. What happened was the exact opposite. Language is too subtle an instrument that can be played only by spiritually mature and kind-hearted people. The changes (six points in all) must be made by all means, but gradually, in five to seven years. As chairman of the orthography board, I plan a meeting this December, but there will be no advertising. We will work out our proposals and submit them to the government. I was surprised to watch the deputies discuss it so energetically without going into the root of the matter, without actually understanding the problem. We are a large Ukrainian nation that cannot afford to overlook the changes taking place in the language, this living organism. Do these changes help this organism stay healthy? Or could they be introducing what the computer people call viruses? Why is France so adamant in protecting its language? Because language is a given nation’s code that has to be preserved. Why are etymological dictionaries considered the most precious national cultural attainments all over the world? And we still don’t know where many words we use actually come from. Thank God, we already have three of the seven volumes of the Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language. It is a unique work. The fourth and fifth volumes are ready to go to press. At a certain period in our history we were denied the opportunity to hear our mother tongue and scientifically and objectively process all those signals received from a living spoken language. If we stop at the current stage of that language complex described as modern literary Ukrainian, if we stop receiving signals ensuing from human minds overloaded with Russian and English, if we fail to respond to Ukrainian surviving under these conditions, accepting some things and rejecting others, becoming polluted — if we don’t do all this, what will our posterity say? It is a matter to occupy scholarly minds, it is the scholars’ responsibility. One can only wonder at others telling these scholars do this, but don’t you dare do that.

The Day: Your institute continues publishing books. What new can readers expect?

M. Z.: The first and second volumes of the academic collection, Taras Shevchenko, are off the presses. We expect to publish another four volumes by the end of the year (there will be 12 volumes in all, including Shevchenko’s artistic heritage). The first volume of the complete collection of works by Oles Honchar is also available. The institute is working on a Shevchenko Encyclopedia. We are about finished doing the computer version of the first volume.

The Day: Which stages in our history and literature or maybe in other literatures left you especially impressed and helped form your individuality?

M. Z.: When I studied at school I read everything at the school library. I read the Bible for my mother (it was left by my father) and sang psalms. My mother was illiterate and a Baptist. Actually, I reread everything at the school library several times, from a booklet on how to grow kok-saghyz [Russian dandelion] to Nikolai Ostrovsky’s The Making of a Hero. I was especially impressed to visit the Shchedrin Library in Leningrad, reading works by Kostomarov and Panteleimon Kulish, the journal Osnova, and other periodicals dating from the 1920s, including VAPLITE and Literaturny yarmarok (Literary Bazaar). I spent hours at the library every weekend. I was impressed by Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Russian publicist writings of the second half of the nineteenth century. Especially Shelgunov’s Sketches of Russian Life . It’s worth reading and rereading, for it has something you can use today. Of course, I read Dostoyevsky’s complete works, including the diaries, but I didn’t like books categorized as critical realism. Even now I think that such literature somehow paved the way for the revolution, because it brought into doubt His Commandments and urged people to avenge their wrongs. That literature crossed the line, the result being that people reading it were left with nothing being held sacred. I enjoyed Lesia Ukrayinka and often reread her letters. And every year I read Shevchenko’s Kobzar and never stop marveling that his talent was from heaven. Take his Caucasus: Who but Shevchenko would raise his voice in defense of the Caucasus people in the Russian Empire? Or his To the Dead, the Living, and Unborn.

Actually, reading is my greatest joy, although I find increasingly less time for pleasure reading, but perhaps the time will come.