Ghastly violence perpetrated on innocent citizens of a sovereign nation. Live and let live are just words on a page, a laughably empty cliche for someone like Vladimir Putin and whoever else is calling the shots in Moscow.
No one, except maybe Putin himself and the hardliners around him, deserves to die a victim of a suicide drone or other means of indiscriminate, cold-hearted aggression.
I’m not saying this the way I’m feeling this, which is really frustrating. It’s been difficult to verbalize the vehemence and anger that have been stirred up since word of a troop buildup on the Ukraine border hit the news cycle in, when, December of last year?
No one has a say in being here. No one has knowingly signed up for living a life destined to be cut short because an out-of-touch oligarch deems it so. It seems unfathomable to me that people are born into the world merely to suffer, born to die without ever getting a taste of self-determination. This in itself is absurd to me, and as good a reason as any for not wanting to become a mere statistic in a senseless battle of wills.
History is littered with vanquished “leaders” who have surrendered to the siren song of power. People who are convinced, wrongly, of their own importance and the propriety of whatever misguided vision drives them. The tragic reality is that their insistence on getting their own way leads to incomprehensible suffering and death. And the most disgusting thing is that they don’t care about tearing so many lives apart.
These are crimes against humanity that, one might think, deserve eternal damnation and permanent residence in a hellish place. Or at least a tribunal at The Hague. The only trouble is, Vladimir Putin and others like him don’t buy into the whole consequences thing. They’re somehow above all that, yet still blind, faithless, and getting desperate, oblivious to anything other than preserving their offensively garish lifestyles and saving their own hides.
3 Cents' 