15 Comments
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Thank you, Nia. I have goosebumps. “They also left me with a question I wake and walk with every day of my life: how do I make choices and exist in a world that seems intent on destroying everything I care about? How does anyone?” Thank you, as always 🙏🏻❤️

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Your writing follows a line of reason and decency that points to better places. I hope we can find them.

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You and Sarah Kendzior are giving me backbone right now. Reading the two of you, powerful women, I feel my resolve strengthen in the face of massive anxiety and grief. Thank you.

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"Find your red line." Thank you for sharing your father's wisdom and his voice, Antonia.

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Compelling writing Antonia! 👏 As you wrote about moral red lines, I thought of Alexei Navalny. I wrote a tribute to him and others of his type here:

https://bairdbrightman.substack.com/p/alexei-navalny

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founding

As always, so extraordinarily well said and true.

And it is so hard to deal with someone who doesn't acknowledge your line exists, or doesn't deem it important, or believes you're dead wrong in drawing it there ("of all places!). Maybe this speaks to moral flexibility in others, or to the kind of relativism that tries to render such lines meaningless (aka. "alternative facts"). That process can be so hard when someone else treats it like a battle of wills to be won, rather than an opportunity to learn someone else's world view in order to enrich your own. And - well, that's kind of what a dictatorship can be, I guess? A rendering of all moral codes null and void in the face of the Great Man's version of reality - "There Is No Red Line" delivered in the style of a Cardassian interrogator attempting to brainwash Captain Picard into seeing the correct number of lights.

Ah. It would be nice if humanity learned the apparently super-difficult business of everyone comparing their red lines without feeling attacked by other people's definitions of them.

Also: I would love to read Jacob's entire history in biography form.

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Beautifully written

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It seems that many hard earned lessons during the Cold War have been forgotten by now. Thanks for helping us remember. I'm struck by the similarities between your view and my friend Mark Slouka's (his parents narrowly escaped Czechoslovakia after the Soviet coup). And also by Solzhenitsyn's disappointment with the West.

I've come to a similar place about the election. I'd like to do something to make a difference in Pennsylvania, where I live, but I feel like there aren't many levers left to pull, especially since I don't know anyone here who is on the fence. The DNC should know who I am, how I've voted, that I was a volunteer for in the last two primaries. But they are still wasting money on mailers for me. The red lines are subtle, hidden. I suppose that itself is a mercy (for now).

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OMG, what an incredible story about your heroic grandfather, I had no idea - WOW. And your current relatives in Russia. Such a brave family, such honor. And your conclusion is so correct, to thine own self be true. I recall an event on Everest many years ago, a guide Dan was leading a group and they came across an incapacitated man near the trail, and they rescued him, calling off their expedition. His words: "If we had left the man to die, that would have always been on my mind. ... How could you live with yourself?" - and other teams had gone on to do their climb, leaving the man. Full story - https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna13272568.

"How could you live with yourself?" has stuck in my mind ever since.

Thanks again for a wonderful column!

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My grandparents on my father’s side were also named Jacob and Anna. They also left Russia under duress, in the early 1900s. I feel your words. Thank you for writing them.

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Thank you for sharing this. I wish it wasn't prescient, but it is.

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Thank you for these words, especially right now.

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Such a thought provoking piece thank you 🙏🏻

Tales of the Soviet Union used to feel like stories from my childhood - I was 18 when the Berlin Wall fell. The lessons never fade though.

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author

They really don’t, though our memories of them often do.

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Very true. There are lessons we have to keep learning and I find the universe keeps presenting is with opportunities to do so.

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