An activist who thrived on agitation, he feared irrelevancy in exile. Winning new respect as he continued to lambast the Kremlin from behind bars cost him his life.

Why, after surviving a fatal poisoning attempt widely blamed on the Kremlin, had he returned to Russia from his extended convalescence abroad to face certain imprisonment and possible death? Even his prison guards, turning off their recording devices, asked him why he had come back, he said.

“I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs,” Mr. Navalny wrote in a Jan. 17 Facebook post to mark the third anniversary of his return and arrest in 2021. “I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.”

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Since 2008, rather than a direct rule, the Army has ruled through politicians and changed regimes as its interests dictated. As the Army is entrenched, not bothered by public shaming, and is ruling through politicians, it is not possible to bring any revolution against the Army.

For the last one decade, PTI has depended upon agitation and dharma politics to bring some kind of revolution, but it has not produced any productive results for the followers, the nation, or the masses. Rather it has produced opposite results and some PTI leaders are in jail.

After February elections, PTI followers are still clinging to the hope of some revolution, which is unrealistic. It will be cruel and heartless on the part of Imran Khan and PTI to continue to play with the hopes and dreams of his followers and give them false hope of a revolution with catchy slogans of “ haqiqi azadi”, and continue the policy of agitation politics. The country has been on standstill for the last decade. The best course is for the PTI to return to Parliament and let the democratic process begin, no matter how imperfect it may be.

PTI alone cannot succeed in taking back full political power from the Army. It should join hands with other parties to revive Benazir-Nawaz like pact of not seeking help or co-operating with Army and gradually chip away at the Army’s hold on politics as it succeeded in Turkey. This is the best course and PTI owe this to its followers, nation, and the party itself.   

The night before my father, Ronald Reagan, died, I listened to his breathing — ragged, thin. Nothing like that of the athletic man who rode horses, built fences at the ranch, constructed jumps from old phone poles, cut back shrubs along riding trails. Or of the man who lifted his voice to the overcast sky and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Time and history folded over themselves inside me, distant memories somersaulting with more recent realities — the 10 years of his journey into the murky world of Alzheimer’s and my determination to abandon the well-worn trail of childhood complaints and forge a new path. To be blunt, I had resolved to grow the hell up.

I can still remember how it felt to be his child, though, and how the attention he paid to America and its issues made me jealous.

Long before my father ran for office, politics sat between us at the dinner table. The conversations were predictable: Big government was the problem, the demon, the thing America had to be wary of. I hated those conversations. I wanted to talk about the boy who bullied me on the school bus, not government overreach.

In time I came to resent this country for claiming so much of him. Yet today, it’s his love for America that I miss most. His eyes often welled with tears when “America the Beautiful” was played, but it wasn’t just sentiment. He knew how fragile democracy is, how easily it can be destroyed. He used to tell me about how Germany slid into dictatorship, the biggest form of government of all.

I wish so deeply that I could ask him about the edge we are teetering on now, and how America might move out of its quagmire of anger, its explosions of hatred. How do we break the cycle of violence, both actual and verbal? How do we cross the muddy divides that separate us, overcome the partisan rancor that drives elected officials to heckle the president in his State of the Union address? When my father was shot, Tip O’Neill, then speaker of the House and always one of his most devoted political opponents, came into his hospital room and knelt down to pray with him, reciting the 23rd Psalm. Today a gesture like that seems impossible.

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“Our memories from the bedrock of who we are. Those recollections, in turn, are built on one very simple assumption: This happened. But things are not quite so simple. “We update our memories through the act of remembering,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember.” “So it creates all these weird biases and infiltrates our decision making. It affects our sense of who we are.” Rather than being photo-accurate repositories of past experience, Ranganath argues, our memories function more like active interpreters, working to help us navigate the present and future. The implication is that who we are, and the memories we draw on to determine that, are far less fixed than you might think. “Our identities,” Ranganath says, “are built on shifting sand.”

“We expect that we should be able to replay the past like a movie in our heads. The problem with that assumption is that we don’t replay the past as it happened; we do it through a lens of interpretation and imagination.”

“ Memory gives an illusion of stability in a world that is always changing. Because if we look for memories, we’ll reshape them into our beliefs of what’s happening right now. We’ll be biased in terms of how we sample the past. We have these illusions of stability, but we are always changing. And depending on what memories we draw upon, those life narratives can change.”

“On the more intentional side, are there things that we might be able to do in the moment to make events last in our memories? In some sense, it’s about being mindful. If we want to form a new memory, focus on aspects of the experience you want to take with you. If you’re with your kid, you’re at a park, focus on the parts of it that are great, not the parts that are kind of annoying. Then you want to focus on the sights, the sounds, the smells, because those will give you rich detail later on when you remember it. Another part of it, too, is that we kill ourselves by inducing distractions in our world. We have alerts on our phones. We check email habitually. So you don’t remember being there, because to some extent you were never really there in the first place. If you set time with your child, don’t check email, and turn off your alerts. That’s the idea. Technology can be helpful for memory, but usually not in the way we use it. You’re not really there if you’re mindlessly taking pictures, because it takes over the experience. When we go on trips, I take candid shots. These are the things that bring you back to moments. If you capture the feelings and the sights and the sounds that bring you to the moment, as opposed to the facts of what happened, that is a huge part of getting the best of memory.”

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