It’s impossible to describe the enormity of the change that has been set upon the world with Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. Certainly, the world I’ve known since my birth in 1948 has suddenly evaporated.
Ambassador George Kennan, the architect of the “containment” policy in the the post-World-War-II age wrote:
“Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you find yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.”
For instance, what nation ever chooses to wage war on — toddlers?
And yet, we do.
“How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.” ~ Svetlana Alexievich
The damage inflicted on our little ones in the name of national defense is truly incalculable.
I read of one 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who traveled nearly 700 miles, by himself with no adult companion, to Slovakia with just a plastic bag, a passport and a telephone number written on his hand. And this was not the first time this sweet boy was uprooted by fighting. As a toddler his family fled Syria’s war.
And yet, correspondingly, nothing rallies the spirit of a nation more than defending and protecting the little ones. There’s a fierce willingness to:
- sacrifice where they otherwise wouldn’t,
- care where they otherwise couldn’t,
- risk where they otherwise shouldn’t.
In this war, men and women are clearly willing to sacrifice everything in order to have a sovereign state to pass on to their children.
But will this sacrifice be enough?
The irony is that just as it seemed the great alliances formed after World War II were coming apart, they suddenly came roaring back with a determination, decisiveness and discernment no one thought possible.
The steadfastness of this fragile nation, fighting against enormous odds, has been deeply inspirational. The stories being filed from the front lines are hard to even imagine.
Here, one man is stopping a whole tank brigade before it can enter his city.
President Zelensky, when asked by the American government if he needed to be evacuated to a safe place outside of Ukraine, responded, “The fight is here [in the Ukraine]. I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Could it be these brave people are demonstrating to us that no challenge is beyond us?
Maybe we don’t need to capitulate to climate change. Maybe we can break the cycle of collective failure:
- in famine, pandemic and disease,
- in addressing climate change,
- in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq or the Sudan.
Maybe this war, the war in Ukraine, has provided the world with a Hiroshima moment, where fear of nuclear annihilation has prompted us to act. Nations are crawling out from their populist bunkers to rally around a common cause.
Just think of it.
If we can freeze this frame we capture the significance of so many nations on the same page, singing the same tune, in perfect harmony. So maybe, just maybe, we can collectively reset the direction of the planet in the 21st century.
Don’t we owe it to our little ones?
“There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.” ~ Dag Hammarskjöld
Just a thought…
Pat
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