Prague Spring. Jan. 5, 1968, Alexander Dubcek was elected first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

He started a program to decentralize the economy, establish democracy and loosen restrictions on the press, speech and travel and to split the country into the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic.

The Soviets viewed these reforms with a jaundiced eye.

21 August 1968. Soviet tanks appeared on the streets of Prague.

A young man named Jan headed west and by suitable subterfuge crossed the border into Germany, where he tended bar and dabbled with drugs, as young men sometimes do.

In due course, the Germans were so kind as to issue him a stateless passport and request his presence elsewhere.

He came to America via the Einstein route, through Switzerland. When I last saw him, he was headed south with an underaged girl and a monkey on his back.

Another young man, also named Jan, decided to stay in Czechoslovakia and fight the Soviet invasion.

After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he was interviewed by a magazine reporter.

When asked what it was like to be a dissident under a totalitarian regime, he replied, “It was a terrible thing to fight the beast. But it gave you a certain focus. Every morning you got up and you knew what you had to do. Today, under democracy, things aren’t quite so clear.”

Cut and run or stand and fight, what should a free person do in America today?