It is considered that these days the society is passive and tired of politics. Everyone stands for themselves only. Ukrainian intellectuals and the clergy are going to make an attempt to change this situation. Liubomyr Huzar, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Myroslav Popovych, and Ivan Dziuba decided to wake the society up.
“We are just starting to rise this wave. But each of you has to do your share in this. A word can be more significant than a shot. A shot can be deafening, but the word can wake you up,” said Sverstiuk press conference at a UNIAN.
“The whole nation is not sleeping, we have a lot of people who would gladly do something, but they just do not know what to do. We want to direct this force that is in the hearts of our people, we want to set it free from all the fears,” Huzar added.
So, the first meeting is going to be held on April 5. The topic of the first national roundtable is “A free person in a free country.” But the list of participants has not been clarified yet. The organizing committee will see to that on March 20.
“We have a small contradiction though,” Dziuba noted. “On the one hand, we wish to be apart from the politics and not to give in to the parties’ manipulations. But on the other, we cannot omit the actual problems that modern society has to face. It would be impossible to be completely separated from politics, otherwise this roundtable would be nothing but moralizing rhetoric. We count on an honest discussion, throughout which we are going to look for answers to the questions.”
The initiators do not have any political ambitions.
“We are not laying claims to anything. We do not intend to become a political party. We are all quite old now, and we are not fit for the positions in the government anymore,” Popovych joked.
And it looks like the representatives of government are not expected at this event.
“It is incredibly hard to talk to deaf people. It occurs to me that a conversation with the people ruling the country right now is desirable, but it will only be possible when there will be someone to talk to, when there will be people who sincerely want to talk, people with open minds and open hearts,” cardinal Huzar stressed.
Organizers underline that they intend to turn the national roundtable meetings into a permanent community organization that is going to become a new social institute for the expression of the sovereign will of the society.
There are a lot of famous representatives of Ukrainian intellectuals listed as the members of the action group “December the First” that calls this roundtable: pedagogue Viacheslav Briukhovetsky, economist and public activist Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, politician Volodymyr Horbulin, Cardinal Liubomyr Huzar, writer and publicist Ivan Dziuba, writer Yevhen Sverstiuk, and others.
