Behind the Stage

The Putins and the Zelenskys are the consequences of our actions and inactions. They enact the scripts that we have written.

How are we to read this moment in history? How to understand the war in Ukraine?

I fear we follow the template of popular history. The individual hero or villain explanation. In 1815 John Adams ruefully wrote to Jefferson about how the future would understanding the American revolution.

 "The essence of the whole will be that Dr Franklin’s electric rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. Then Franklin electrified him, and thence forward those two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislations, and War." (slightly different in an earlier letter to Benjamin Rush)

Villains and heroes. Putin and Zelenskyy. Sometimes I wish the letters would slide off onto the floor.

Places, roles and scenarios are prepared by many prior choices. Even now we are creating futures by our decisions and lack of decisions.

We honor, as we should those who “rise to the moment.” But who remember the wise and the foolish who, unseen, worked in the past to keep things on or off the path. They wrote the dissents in important court decisions. They catered to the crowd and made fortunes. They fanned the flames of racial hatred in political campaigns. They saw danger in excessive nationalism and helped restrain policy. They published mistruths. They authored serious novels. They taught in classrooms and they walked in demonstrations. Sometimes the best were heeded and we had peace. Sometimes the worse were heard and we had war. The Putins and the Zelenskys are end results.

They are the products of all we have done and all we have not done as a community of nations and individual citizens.