The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

Martin Luther King, Jr., had called it “the fierce urgency of now,” the transformational moment when aspirations for freedom must be realized, when the voice of a movement can’t be stilled, when the heart’s demands will not stand further delay. I saw it that night. I felt it. It was thrilling and affirming. If you told me I could choose to retain only a handful of memories from my long life, that night at the Maidan would be one of them. Ukraine’s politics might be complicated by competing ethnic loyalties, but that’s mostly because Russia stokes the anger and insecurities of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. There was nothing tribal about the Maidan that night. There were nationalist sentiments in evidence, of course, but in a common demand for independence from corruption, injustice, and imperial dominion. The fervent political movements of our age seem so often to be the workings of religious fanaticism or injured ethnic pride or dehumanizing ideologies of one kind or another, and the power seekers who profit from them. That night I witnessed a fervent mass movement for the universal ideals of freedom and justice. That’s what a European identity meant to those people. It was humankind I saw in that square, in all its impossibly resilient dignity, known to God, and striving to be recognized and answered to by the powerful forces who had set themselves above them. Those ideals were my cause, the cause that gave meaning to my eventful life, a life that might otherwise have been ...