Rohana R. Wasala

Lesson 2: Renewal begins with  children

Timothy Snyder (55) maintained interaction with his two children (ten year old son and the younger daughter) while he was in a Florida hospital at the beginning of 2020.  No doubt, his wife Marci Shore (53), also teaching history  at Yale University then, helped this loving interaction between the father and his children.The children told him about their school work and inquired about his progress towards recovery. Snyder remembers how he kept thinking about his children even in his sickest moments. and finds fault with America for falling short of the standards reached by countries like Austria in infant and child health.

Of course, in fairness to America today (2025), it must be said that children, parents, and their health and welfare, and the family institution are receiving the highest recognition in the country, irrespective of untenable extremes of neoliberalism ideologies like wokeism and related lgbtqa+ and transgender sex change surgery issues, etc., as evident at least in the American domestic political domain. Elon Musk (53), Senior Advisor to US President Donald Trump (78), is often seen with his youngest son having a piggyback ride on his busy father’s shoulders even on state occasions; President Trump sometimes proudly shows off his nineteen year old son Barron accompanying him on the stage, the fresh young man stealing the show at his old father’s expense, especially among young voters. The youngish US Vice President J.D. Vance (40) and Usha Vance (39), his wife of Indian origin, were on a four day visit (beginning April 21) to resurgent India recently with their three little children who, innocently unaware of and unconcerned about what was going on around them, endeared Americans to Indians, thereby greatly enhancing the efficacy of their parents’ diplomatic endeavour to strengthen bilateral bonds and economic and security cooperation between the two powerful nations. Musk and Trump are businessmen turned politicians, while the Vances have been lawyers. But all four are normal parents. Cynics might cavil at such ‘childish displays’ as advertising gimmicks for promoting the pro binary sex ideology perspective, where children are insensitively exploited as mascots for their propaganda. But a more sober judgement would be to view such high profile demonstrations as indicating an emergent trend in America towards a return to healthy normalcy in its sex culture where parents with their own children form close knit stable family units that coalesce into a vibrant society.

Snyder recounts how well he and his wife Marci were treated as first-time parents in a public hospital in Vienna in Austria, where their son was born in 2009. They had to pay hardly anything by way of hospital fees. The Snyders ‘experienced a sense of what good health care felt like from inside: intimate and inexpensive’.  Marci was given a ‘mother-child passport’, which was recognized at health facilities throughout Austria. When she entered any hospital or doctor’s office, she was asked to show the ‘passport’. The doctor or the nurse didn’t look at a screen to identify the mother and her child.

In Austria, according to Snyder, pregnant mothers close to delivery time are asked to come to the maternity hospital at water breaking (i.e., when the amniotic sac covering the foetus breaks) or when contractions occur at 20 minute intervals. In America, they are asked to wait longer until the contractions are only three or four minutes apart. So in America, deliveries sometimes happen in the back seat of a car, putting both the babies and the mothers in danger. In Austria, again, the mother and the baby have to stay in hospital for 96 hours (4 days) after delivery, allowing time for the baby to have a good start, and for the mother to learn to breastfeed. The difference between America and Austria in this respect, Snyder says, is one between a logic of profit and a logic of life. 

Even the general public in Austria are helpful towards parents with children. The institutions that helped the Snyders (as first-time parents) ‘from the public hospital to the public kindergarten to the public transport were an infrastructure of solidarity that helped people together, making them feel that at the end of the day they were not alone’, whereas in America, ‘birth is where our story about freedom dies. We never talk about how bringing new life into the world makes heroic individualism impossible’. (That is, doing everything alone, with little outside help, preserving one’s autonomy, is not possible in the real world)

This applies to children in their formative years, as well. A piece of wisdom Snyder offers is that ‘to be free involves having a sense of one’s own interests and of what one needs to fulfill them. Thinking about the constraints of life under pressure requires an ability to experience, name and regulate emotions’. But this freedom cannot be gained without help. That is the paradox of freedom as Snyder calls it; no one is free without help

Snyder distils into his critique of the unsatisfactoriness of the American healthcare system an important insight in respect of early childhood care: it is that ‘how children are treated when they are very young profoundly affects how they will live the rest of their lives. That is perhaps the most important thing that scientists have to teach us about health and freedom today’. Speech, thought and will emerge as infants and toddlers interact with other people. ‘We learn as very small children, if we ever learn, to recover from disappointment and to delay pleasure. …what  allows these capacities to develop are relationships, play and choices’.

Snyder points out that providing good healthcare facilities for children leads eventually to a lower crime rate, functional democracy, and efficiency in decision making. He feels that emotional regulation is overlooked in America. There is no sufficient focus on the relationship between parents and children. The regrettable lapses in American health care affects children more negatively than for adults. Parents need to relate to their children in ways that promote their optimal physical, mental and ethical development is part of a good healthcare system. Healthy interaction between parents and children is of vital importance for the education of children. Probably, the situation in Sri Lanka may not be better than in America in view of, among other things, the economic hardships that parents inevitably have to face.

Children and young adults, particularly in suburban and rural areas, are a threatened species. Apart from the economic difficulties that their parents experience, restricting their ability to meet the cost of augmenting the education that the state provides free of charge, non-urban Sri Lankan children often suffer due to a lack of basic infrastructure facilities like good transport, proper school buildings, modern libraries and adequately equipped labs, internet facilities and easy accessibility to local and foreign online sources of learning and research.

Lesson 3: The truth will set us free

After a procedure done on his liver in the emergency room of an American hospital on December 29, 2019, Timothy Snyder was admitted to a room, where he spent the last days of the year and the first days of the next ‘raging and contemplating’. He had to share that room with a Chinese man with a number of afflictions. The Chinese didn’t know any English. So, a lot of ‘personal and medical information was communicated loudly, slowly and repeatedly’. The Chinese was senior to Snyder by fourteen years; he was in withdrawal from nicotine smoking and alcohol drinking after five decades of daily consumption of the two intoxicants. The two became mutually accommodating friends.

But Snyder suffered a lung infection due to close contact with the Chinese, who had himself succumbed to illness caused by a parasite ingested while eating raw fish on a previous visit to China, but got well later. However, Snyder recovered and left the hospital, after exchanging farewell messages with the friendly Chinese, who had to stay on further in hospital.

The latter, Snyder says, is an example of two ways that medicine can get to the truth: thinking along with the patient, focusing on their story, and searching for information through tests. His conclusion is that in early 2020, the federal government failed Americans in both ways. There was no sensible discussion of the history of pandemics, and no procedure to test for the new coronavirus. The sections of the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security meant to deal with epidemics, as well as a special unit in the Agency for International Development meant to predict epidemics had been disbanded. American health experts had been called back from the rest of the world. The last officer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assigned to China had been recalled to the US in July 2019, a few months before the epidemic broke out.

President Trump had overseen budget cuts for institutions looking after public health. The US surgeon general sang in a tweet on February 1, 2020: ‘Roses are red/Violets are blue/Risk is low for #coronavirus/But high for the flu’. Nero was fiddling while Rome was burning! As the year began, Americans were denied the basic knowledge necessary for making independent decisions of their own. President showed little anxiety about the steadily growing threat of the coronavirus. ‘It is going to disappear…like a miracle’. In effect they were creating a ‘news desert’. The media kept silent about the spreading pollution. Google and FB don’t carry news. They only raked in advertising revenues as usual.

But the disease was transmitted rapidly across the counties . The Covid death toll rose in leaps and bounds. ‘The seven American counties with the most Covid deaths would now rank among the top twenty countries. These are simple facts’. Snyder observes: ‘Since the truth sets you free, the people who oppress you resist the truth’. Historian Snyder refers to why British people have unkind memories of prime minister Neville Chamberlain because he tried to please the public in 1938 by falsely asserting that there was no need to go to war against Hitler. Winston Churchill earned their love and honour for having told them the unpleasant truth that they had to make war on the Nazi leader to stop him. 

Snyder remembers reading (J.R.R. Tolkien’s) The Lord of the Rings to his son and daughter before he became ill. In that story Gandalf the wizard is a noble character with great power. He tells truths that people don’t want to hear. He is usually disliked as a bearer of bad news, and his advice is ignored. Although Gandalf is powerful, he cannot save the world by himself. He needs to build up a coalition by convincing others of the reality of a threat; but they won’t listen to him. Instead, out of ignorance, they look for an excuse for submission.That is human nature, but no way to be free. In frustration, Gandalf finally retorts that without knowledge, freedom has no chance.

Lesson 4: Doctors should be in charge 

Snyder’s unexpected midnight admission to a hospital in Florida and two days stay there coincided with his mother’s birthday that year. So, he was unable to be with her on the occasion. The attention he got from the doctors was hurried and seemingly perfunctory, and it was hardly face-to-face. The longest time of fifteen minutes he saw a doctor was over Skype with a neurologist. Snyder thinks that the problem is not that doctors do not want to work with patients. They do work really hard, as people saw during the pandemic, risking their own health and even their lives in order to save others’ lives. The problem, according to Snyder, is that they have no say in what happens around them, but waste their time and energy pacifying greater powers. In America, doctors no longer have the authority that patients expect and need from them. 

Readers, please remember that this was five years ago. The situation in America may have improved since, especially after the coronavirus pandemic took its toll and departed. The alleged mercenary bias of the American healthcare system largely caused by the profiteering Big Pharma, the insensitivity of the colluding political authorities, and the misinformation  pedalled by the media (particularly digital)  that Snyder sharply criticizes in this book may have eased, too. 

However, a little reflection will convince the intelligent readers that Timothy Snyder’s Four Lessons have great relevance to certain aspects of the deplorable situation in Sri Lanka today. This ad hoc review of mine of Snyder’s book, if read with a ‘comparative research’ oriented mind, will make the book look like a mirror held up to the prevailing reality there.

N.B.: I have used a paperback edition of the book in my possession, issued by The Bodley Head, London, in 2020, in which year Snyder’s book containing his cogent case and powerful appeal for redress was first published.

Concluded