Ukraine

What it means

There is a time for debating the past and a time for acting in the present.  In the future we will search for answers and offer ideas about how to avoid “a next time.”

Now, as the buildings burn and civilians die, unity of purpose and action is required.  We may still disagree, but our differences should be over honest alternatives, and after leaders make decisions, we should all work together to implement them.  That is what unity looks like in times of crisis.   That is the America most of us value.   

This may be all one needs to say at this time. 

I do, though, want to emphasize something more.  How we deal with this crisis matters even beyond the suffering of the people of Ukraine. 

We must deny Russia her goals, because it is imperative that we show all peoples, now and in the future that war cannot be an option for any nation state.  Not now!  Not tomorrow! Not in a distant future!

Tragically, we seem as immune to the immeasurable tragedy of lives lost in war as we are to so many other preventable deaths.  But this is not the insanity I am describing.

Nor am I focusing on the many important goals (poverty, hunger, medical care, human rights, climate, inequalities) that are delayed or lost when we mobilize all our forces to fight a war.  True and tragic as that is. 

Instead, I urge that even now, perhaps because of now, we realize that we are living in a world that believes in war—whether to rally the home population, to gain access to scarce resources, to punishes injustice, to rights wrongs, or to advance the cause of religion or justice or democracy.  That is, we live in a world that will inevitably destroy itself. 

Not this time (probably).  Not next time.  But at some point, at some time, as more countries stockpile nuclear weapons (as they will), some unstable leader or cult of leaders will resort, when confronted with defeat, to nuclear annihilation.    Although the odds may be one in a hundred, a hundred or more opportunities are fated to come.   

Wars to conquer and destroy nations lead inevitably to the war that will one day destroy nearly all life on this planet. 

We humans have had a short history on the Earth.  For thousands of years we battled with sticks and stones.  We are no longer isolated gatherings, farmers, hunters and herders, spreading out across continents, forcing our way into each other’s territory.  We are partners of death, armed with the means of mass obliteration.

If we allow nations to gain from war again and again, we make such a final conflict, a war that will end all our hopes and dreams, ever more likely.

Pause….  Some of you who have read this far realize I have left something out.  Russia is not the only nation that views war as a valid way to change regimes.   It is very late, but perhaps there is still time for Americans to recognize this fact.  We too have supported, have chosen, war.  Let this moment set a clear message.  No more.