About Ukraine

Over the past two, three years, a growing number of us have been identitying with the frog, the batracian placed in a pot of cold water under which a flame is lit. The water gets warmer, then hot, then boiling, and kills the frog which hasn’t even seen the end coming.

So we’ve been buffered, thrown against this wall or that, feeling as if headed for a pot of boiling water, or destined to suffocate in a hospital ward through a virus arrived from who knows where and intent on killing. We’ve been quarantined, worried, lonely even when not alone, trying to get work done, endlessly scrolling down Netflix or YouTube or a dozen other entertainment sites, and even when the sun shone through our windows, feeling as aimless as a Kafka character wrapped in grey fog.

Politics grew ever more nasty during and since the Trump presidency and our countries, all of them, uncertain about the future, a number of them crushed under the brute force of despots.

And now the recent earthshaking crisis with Putin’s gaping maw ready to swallow whole Ukraine, the largest country in Europe and long for him a detested problem he hasn’t been able to solve so far-his solution of choice meaning reintegrating Ukraine into mother Russia of which the Russian President has long been trying to bring back borders into the Czar’s heyday or, barring that, to the USSR’s red glory.

The Lessons of Berlin

Not far from the bunker where Hitler and his cronies, Eva Braun, Goebbbels etc. all these hideous nightmarish figures, committed suicide, not far from the German chancery, rises in the Berlin sky a wrought-iron profile of Georg Elser, the young carpenter who in 1939, foreseeing the destruction caused by the war that had just started, made an ill-fated attempt to assassinate Hitler. (Hitler didn’t die, Elser was caught and sent to Dachau where he was shot in 1945, for some reason spared until then.)

Under the avalanche of horrible news–the unconscionable tearing apart of families in the United States, the turning away on European shores of migrants fleeing impossible conditions in their own countries, the reelection of Erdogan whose unlimited new powers can truly crush the Turks and definitely do away with Ataturk’s legacy,  the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Kennedy to be replaced by who knows which Trump flunky, corrupt power-crazed strongmen coming to power in too many places we thought safe from extremism, we can only draw comfort from the “this too shall pass” thought. For me, indignant at the start of each day with the news, nothing good or consoling comes to mind as much as a recent visit to Berlin–my first, I’m ashamed to say.