Published by Leidybos įmonė “Kriventa” (2017)
On a fine Lithuanian day in 2006, I got a surprise. Working at the American Center in Old Town Vilnius, a city full of the ghosts of history, I was pleased to have one of the best jobs in the whole of the Foreign Service. As a public affairs officer and cultural attaché, it was a relief to work in a place where almost everyone openly liked Americans. In a world full of unhappy misperception, I faced just the exact opposite in Vilnius: here instead I had to manage expectations of what we were actually capable of doing. We were not just a benign new Western version of the Warsaw Pact after all. So it was in my daily routine to meet a stream of enthusiastic petitioners—young, old, academics, activists, parading in with bright new ideas of big things that we could do together. Seminars, art exhibitions, music recitals, film festivals; you get the picture. In other words, I was thoroughly used to people asking me for things.
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