I JUST LEARNED that I am 80% Austrian! Obviously, I was surprised; for how come they never told me about it all this time? Not even my aging parents!
It unfolded just recently, through the Internet, when I was browsing a Mises website. An unassuming sign struck my eyes. It read: Are you Austrian?. One magical click took me before a panel of most erudite scholars. To me they appeared somewhat intimidating. Then they asked me questions, which were no less intimidating. I oscillated between darting away or bracing myself, but a voice within reminded me: hey this is about your life; some mundane matters, maybe, but like it or not, they influence your very life! And so I braved the answers, one by one and by one. Then they left me on my own for some time,to come back again before I realized it. One of them cleared his throat and read out the verdict: You are 80% Austrian! His voice deep baritone, but hey, wait a sec; what is it? What's the matter with you people?
Yet, knowing a bit about their contribution to man's history of thoughts (although mainstream waves washed them ashore and burried them in deep sand, almost to complete oblivion), kept me from blurting out. So I'm Austrian then? I didn't think I was being flattered, nor did I feel the need to thank them. (Pardon me, but if you lived as a young man in the part of the world I'm in now, you'd know that nationalism as concocted to you as a kid has been just an empty word--no I correct myself, a mantra for concealing state's robbery and mass suppression.)
Anyway, at parting the the pundits handed me a token: Human Action by Ludwig von Mises.*) A kind of book that easily interests people in search of the kernels of truth, and certainly one of the most thickest, too. For this I thanked them and promised to read it with an open mind.**)
*) In a less ideal, bodily world, this means downloading a handsome megabytes and printing out over 900 PDF pages.
**) Now that I'm still reading it, every page of the book has got me equally enlightened. The fact that I'm not done with it doesn't nullify the authencity of my feelings, and this is what I'm trying to say: Whether or not you are Austrian doesn't matter, but Human Action DOES matter regardless of your nationality. I guess I cannot thank those Misesians well enough for this.
