1. Pandemics drive people apart, wars bring them together.
2. No one who survived the blitz in England wanted it to return, but post-war Lononders remarked on the sense of community and togetherness offered by a common enemy and unifying purpose.
3. In the “reality” of Ukraine, you also feel the desperation we all had for something “real” enough to bring us together, something more important than cat memes or political no-nothings frothing at the mouth about masks.
4. If, somehow, we can survive this and learn to put a ceiling on the power any one person, or country, wields, maybe we can make some inroads into weapons proliferation, economic divide, and climate . . . maybe.
5. Never forget that Mr. Trump was impeached for denying aid to Ukraine, that his campaign manager (Manafort) worked for the guy who Putin wanted as his puppet, and that the only change to the Reublican platform of 2016 was to make it harder for Ukraine to defend itself.
As reported in The Washington Post, July 18, 2016:
The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.
Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.
6. Twoards the thought that we are all connected, I saw a video today of soon-to-be-refugees leaving a bombed out part of a city in Ukraine in which one of the middle-aged men was wearing a UCLA baseball hat.
7. As long as yachts are becoming the “let them eat cake” symbol of Russian oligarchs, can we recall that Jeff Bezos has a support yacht for his 500 million dollar yacht? That oligarchy is hardly a Russian problem alone?