The madness of war
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‘The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.’
--George Orwell
Lost in all the political grandstanding and finger-pointing is the fact that human beings are dying right now. Bombs are falling. Bombs kill people. That's what they're for. This isn't some sort of geo-political chess match. It's molten hot pieces of shrapnel seeking and destroying.
The shells started raining down in the middle of the night, as they often do. As if it’s a fireworks display that requires oohs and aahs. Families huddled together, terrified. Parents immediately thought nothing except how to keep their children safe. Children looked to their parents to protect them. The instinct is to flee. But to where? There's a certain madness to war, a certain disdain for rationality. My Uncle was in London during the blitz, and remembered screaming at the German planes as they dropped their bombs all around him. "Come down here and fight like men, you bastards!" ....as his friend dragged him back into a shelter. Bodies were buried in the rubble he was standing on. Again, the madness of war. He was the most mild-mannered of men. And then the bombs sought him out. He turned instantly savage. That's what war does.
It comes from the sky. The rumbling gets closer....like thunder from an approaching storm. Ukrainians are sheltering in subway stations. Just like Londoners and my Uncle in 1940. They are driving around their cities looking for ATM machines that are not out of cash. Rumors are everywhere. Some of them might even be true. People are carrying suitcases and their pets and their infant children. Some are vowing to take up arms and fight. Reservists who only weeks earlier learned how to fire a rifle and bandage a wound are now potential front-line soldiers. Reporters on the scene are frantic to keep up.....to cut through the fog of war. Photos showing cars leaving the capital city of Kyiv remind me of Gulf Coast hurricane evacuations. All the traffic heading out...
Soon the armies will meet....and things will get more personal. Push button wars are one thing, like playing video games in a room full of beer and Cheetos. People dying remotely. But that's never enough. So the kids (and they are ALWAYS kids) that Putin will send into harms way will kill and be killed to make rich men richer, weighted down by an avalanche of propaganda and nationalism and the never-ending ability of boys to romanticize war right up until the moment a bullet tears into them.
Meanwhile Ukrainians are gathering in long lines outside of hospitals, waiting to donate blood. Never underestimate, in your frenzied jingoism, just how much the other guy loves their own home.
Overnight all the Facebook virologists in this country have turned into foreign policy experts. The MAGAs are out in force with the "this would have never happened under Trump" argument...which stops at the "this would have never happened under Trump" part because there is no more. I'm left with the sinking feeling that if only my anti-vaxx high school friend who currently works in the produce department at the local supermarket had gotten that State Department job instead, Europe might not be in this mess. Meanwhile, I'm bombarded with dumb stares every time I whip out my pocket almanac and ask my most vocal companions to find Ukraine. The struggle is real, bro.
War is much too easy to digest for those who don't have to do the dying.....which is to say the men (and it's always men) who start them.
All we can do now is wait. The fear is palpable. War never brings good news.
We've seemingly lost the human touch. We're private keyboard warriors now, fighting mini-wars every day without fear of retribution. We do not learn. We regurgitate. Far too many of us seem incapable of empathy. There's been plenty of back and forth since the bombs started falling, but almost none of it takes on the savage human cost of war. The ignorance of our own history makes it impossible to learn from that history. Discourse has degenerated into a dick-waving contest. Nuance, like Luca Brasi, sleeps with the fishes.
Tonight's darkness promises more of the same.
Mark Twain noted that "Man is the only animal that deals in the atrocity of War. He is the only one that goes forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate his own kind".
Also, Twain noted, we're the only animal that blushes.
Or needs to.
May whoever chooses war be forever haunted by those who perish in it.
In a bit...
--tf