About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
We have become spectators. We sit in safe houses and binge-watch a war. We feel sad and upset at the carnage and the destruction, horrified at the 109 empty strollers, but just possibly, we expect a final scene. The one at the end of the movie, with the houses and hospitals rebuilt, the lawns green and mowed, a father tossing the ball across the front yard to his son, two women pushing perambulators down the neighborhood street as the hero and heroine stroll into the last frame for the final kiss — fade to black.
This is not a movie. The physical damage to Ukraine will not be repaired for years; the emotional damage will not be repaired in a lifetime; the dead will be dead forever.
We have turned news into entertainment and politics into sport. We cross-reference theater and life. We are willing to listen to talking heads predicting, finger-pointing, spinning hypothetical plot lines, and characterizing people they do not know. Their false narratives evoke emotions. Here is the problem: this is real.
There are, among us, battle-ready men and women. They are armed and hardened by experience, they know how to fight — what if they don’t know who to aim at? What if they are deeply confused — cannot sort through and separate truth from lies, the good guys from the bad, and news from headlines-for-profit?
What if there are politicians among us who do not govern; they incite, excite, and entertain? So, what if the politicians and those who promote them tell lies to intentionally confuse the public; do it for money? What if they believe they can defraud us of our votes?
Putin invades a peaceful country; they call it Biden’s war. Putin defiles the sanctity of a national border, shakes the world, and they tell us Putin’s a smart guy. Exactly how is Putin smart? His people are repressed and suffering, the sons of Russia are dying on Ukrainian soil, and if Putin wins, what does he get: a blasted country with mass graves and a people who hate him.
They told us Putin would go through Ukraine like a knife through butter — a three-day march to Kyiv. They told us Biden was a ditherer. Have they noticed that, in the real world, Putin’s army is stalled, and that ditherer pulled the whole world together in opposition to Putin? Without demur, all nations took Biden’s call and saw the wisdom of what he was asking. Wait for it… even China listened and abstained. Here on planet earth, away from the whine of the frozen-food-trust-fund baby, Biden is the President of the United States, with enormous power, and lucky for us, a moral compass.
In the real world, Biden is trying to avoid WWIII, punish aggression, and at the same time, clean up the mess left by the other guy. That other guy could have been in the White House still, and then what? He says Putin is a genius, a tough guy, “go Putin.” He says none of this would have happened if he were in the White House. That is true. Something else would have happened. The President of the United States would have cheered the invasion and left that entire part of the world vulnerable; gotten out his golf clubs or ordered in McDonald’s.
We all knew that kid in the school yard. He was the one who followed the bully around offering to run errands, gave the bully his lunch money, anything in exchange for protection. We knew that kid and we know why none of this would have happened if Trump were in the White House. That kid would have helped Putin explain to the world that Ukraine was not a separate country but part of Russia; that kid would have traded our security for his own in a New-York-second.
So, there are those among us who are armed, ready, angry, but very confused. Not certain who the enemy is. Last time they attacked Capital police. Who will they attack next? Librarians? They are lied to and sadly believe the lies. It is a blessing that, in the real world, the real president is working hard to make the world safe from treachery, and Putin has been declared a war criminal.
And what is Putin trying to do? Perhaps Putin wants WWIII; why not? He is not doing so well in the world as presently constituted. He may think any change an improvement. If he gets his wish? We will not be spectators anymore.
I didn’t exactly live through WWII, but I grew up amidst the scars on the men’s bodies and in the women’s eyes. If there is WWIII, we will all pray for the day when the only price we paid was for expensive gas, and the only hardships we suffered were inflation and a slow supply chain.
Wake up! Democracy demands something of its citizens. Know who to aim at; know your friends from your enemies. Fight to silence traitors. They count on our gullibility and lack of information. Free speech is a right, but it is not unfettered. The First Amendment does NOT protect all speech. It restricts obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising, defamation, and sedition.
No one has written the final scene; few know how. No one knows how far Putin will go, or how far the world will have to go to stop him. This may end as it began, in a faraway land, or it may drag us in and the world with us. We will not be spectators then. If that comes, let us face it together. If so divided, we will be too weak to win.
