Big Damn Heroes, Cassandra, Immoral Values, Political Crack, Russian Imperialism, War In Ukraine

We Can Be Heroes

This has been a terrible week. Incredibly we are watching a war in progress and we really have no idea what is going to happen. We’re in the early days of what is going to be a grisly and heartbreaking war. I don’t think it’s going to get any better for a very long time.

I’m not going to mythologize the Ukrainian people as a group of warriors because, from the TV interviews I’ve seen with them, their emotions run the entire gamut. But there have been some people who are showing great courage.

When I first read about Volodymyr Zelensky it was an article about how a comedian was running for the presidency of Ukraine. I started to scoff, but then I remembered that I thought Al Franken was a pretty good politician so I stopped.

My first impression was wrong. The thing about Zelensky is that on paper he’s in way over his head. But he beat back TFG’s demands and now he’s putting his life on the line for his country by standing up to Putin. Friday we leaned that the US offered to get him out of Kyiv and he refused. We saw such extraordinary courage from an unexpected source.

Another Ukrainian who showed incredible courage was the babushka who berated the Russian soldiers in her town:

Here’s the translation of her scolding:

I am ethnically a Slav:  my mom and my dad are 100% Slavic. Their parents were 100% Slavic. These are my people. The command to put sunflower (the Ukrainian national flower) seeds in your pockets because you will die there and the sunflowers will then mark your grave and your failure is striking and chilling and maybe prophetic.

I hate war and conflict and killing. I also hate injustice. This week has been terrible. But the defiance of that comedian and that babushka hearten me.

On Friday David Bowie’s son responded to a tweet from Russia Today quoting his father with this:

So here it is. Peace be with all of us now.

 

One thought on “We Can Be Heroes”

  1. You really can’t tell how someone will react to an existential challenge, until they face an existential challenge for the first time.

    That goes double for what people think that they themselves would do in that situation.

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