Words matter
This is my once-a-week free column. If you like it, maybe think about becoming a paid subscriber? For that you get ‘em all.
I don't even know what "normal" means anymore. Do you?
Interaction these days feels weird. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium anymore. Either we're sitting in the corner all mysterious, like Bob Dylan at a party, or we're going wildly over the top trying to cram 2 missed years into one bar-night. Sometimes we want to do everything and go everywhere and bark at the moon even if the endless NEPA clouds hide it away. Other times? The mere suggestion of "going out" is laughable. We're damaged goods Bubba, dressed in sweatpants and covered with blankets on the couch, and that damage manifests itself in all kinds of ways.
I never really gave a shit what people thought about this or that hot-button issue. In the days before social media your beliefs weren't all laid bare for all to see.......and even asking something like "who did you vote for?" would have been considered rude. Now it's unavoidable. One quick glance at a facebook feed can sometimes tell you all you need to know. Bald eagles and pick-up trucks on one side, and this or that troubled nation's flag superimposed on the other. Even further, sometimes I was floored when I finally DID find out that such and such, whom I've known and been friends with for decades, has beliefs which I find extremely distasteful. How on earth did the friendship blossom in the first place? And why was I not ending it?
Better angels and all that. Has to be.
But now….better angels hell…..we are at war. Literally and figuratively. All these years later, all that history learned and presumably forgotten, we continue to bluster and bumble our way towards nothing much. Putin is just the latest in a long, ragged line of maniacs who, through a heavy dose of "we don't give a shit as long as you give us bread and circuses" from the masses, have managed to take control of large, well stocked militaries. He was always just crazy enough to make everybody slightly nervous.....especially when he was left in a room alone with a fucking dolt like Donald Trump. But everybody laughed at hapless Mitt Romney when he suggested years ago that the winds from the cold war were still blowing. We had already moved on to the crazed jihadists, and there's only room for one boogey man at a time.
And now Putin is on the rampage, killing women and children indiscriminately....and all we can offer in response is not allowing the Russians to watch the new Batman movie and putting "closed for now" signs in all the McDonald's restaurants. Which, come to think of it, is way more help than we provided Rwanda in 1994 when one million of them were being slaughtered in a daylight genocide. Which is to say I'm not really surprised at our moral cowardice, but that its repetitiveness makes the heartbreak worse. We did send the Vice President to Poland for...well.....a photo-op I guess. She said "atrocities of unimaginable proportions" were underway in Ukraine. But, she stopped short of calling Russia's actions in Ukraine war crimes. Much in the same way the US stopped short of calling what was happening in Rwanda a "genocide".
(At the time we grudgingly admitted that “acts of genocide” were being committed in Rwanda. When an exasperated reporter asked the State Department spokesperson “how many ‘acts of genocide’ equals a genocide?” the response was “that’s just not a question I’m prepared to answer..” and at that moment our moral authority crumbled.)
Words like "war crimes" and "genocide" require responses. "Atrocities" and, in Rwanda's case, "civil war", not so much.
Poland asked to deploy all of its MiG-29 fighter jets to US Air Force's Ramstein Air Base in Germany so they could then be provided to Ukraine. They didn't ask for OUR jets. Merely to use our base for THEIR jets.
We said no, because of course we did. A NATO no-fly zone is also off the table.....the type of bureaucratic “not it” that’s gonna haunt bureaucrats who know better but are too small to risk their careers.
The last few days have shown bloodied pregnant women being carried out of shelled hospitals on stretchers....but Americans seem more transfixed by the numbers at the gas station. Nothing distracts us more than a minor inconvenience we can vault into the grievance stratosphere. We have absolutely no sense of perspective. We have to be the sun.
We no longer have leaders who can inspire. Leaders who can, with the simple power of oratory, take us all to the place we need to be. These men....Churchill and Roosevelt and now Zelenskyy, were (and are) as flawed as the rest of us. But they're able to take the puzzle that was thrown onto the floor in a temper tantrum and get everybody working on putting the pieces back together.
We need that. We don’t have it. Biden seems hesitant…..confused…..even overwhelmed by what’s now on his plate. Like the boss at work who won’t let you improve upon the way things are done because “we’ve always done it this way”. America no longer leads. We find a like-minded crowd to hide in.
Morally, our behavior as a nation during this crisis has been reprehensible.
Eventually, worldwide collective shame will force us to assist Ukraine…..probably after Zelenskyy has been martyred and Kyiv is leveled to the ground. By then, history will already have judged us.
Harshly.
In a bit…
—tf