My brother called my father the Michael Jordan of crazy, somebody who had complete game. The only positively intentioned lesson I have from my father came via my brother too.
He and dad were at a lecture given by someone important about a current event. Before Mr. Important stepped up to the microphone my father leaned over to my brother to say, “Now you just watch, his first word will be ‘I.’” And so, according to my brother, it was.
For better? For worse? I have been sensitive to the word ever since. Maybe to the detriment of being more alpha, maybe with the burden of a false pride in keeping quiet as others self-promoted.
I said at the start of this week I would write about this today and had planned to connect it to how “I” gets pressed into creative work as well as to someone I love telling me: “where ego was there shall God be.”
Now, though, I am thinking about how a week ago people in Kyiv were going to work and today they are picking up guns so as to shoot at people far better trained and far more lethally equipped to shoot at them.
They will get slaughtered. And the ones who survive will be traumatized for generations. Europe and the world may fall apart, Kyiv turning into the keystone of what was only after is is blown apart.
From what I can tell they are not doing this because of some religious mandate or even deep love of country. It looks more like they just don’t want some Russian a-hole telling them what to do. “I may not be important, but I refuse to be what you tell me I am.”
Crazy does not even begin to describe it.