by I recall having a conversation several months back with an older fellow in my life. He is sort of an old-school Boomer liberal, with anti-war, anti-imperialist leanings. He’s into trains. He sends NPR money every month. Ok, you get it. And in email, I made reference to this one particular war atrocity perpetrated by the United States. Given his political leanings, it seemed like an innocuous reference but it drew some umbrage and he replied with a cautioning against morally equating both sides in WWII.
It really struck me as quite… odd. I mean, maybe I don’t know the perfect answer as to what moral is, but targeting and killing 100,000 civilians seems pretty much like the opposite of any sort of “moral” I am familiar with. Yeah, I get this all happens within a context, but what context do I need to explain why 100,000 civilians should be murdered? Explain it to me.
But this shows what really is at everyone’s core. Eventually. On something. There’s always a point where there is an us and a them. You are in or you are out. You pick. Or you will get picked. There’s no way out of this. Like no atheist in a fox hole, there is no anti-racist in a war. Polite human universalism proves a thin veneer any time outrage reaches a particular level or shocks impact at a depth and with a frequency where people just can’t help themselves anymore.
Watching current events unfolding in Ukraine, something primitive returns. Reality intrudes. A politics almost entirely reliant upon narrative manipulation, emotional blackmail of the public, corporate-imposed censorship, and probably actual propaganda must confront the real, kinetic, physical reality. Ground is taken and held. Then maybe lost. Grain needs physical infrastructure to be exported, and can’t just be routed with the efficiency of an internet data packet, we learn. Supply chains, markets access, the nature of money, and sea power are all suddenly relevant.
And this, like a few other things, is making everyone insane.
But I must say, whatever ethno-narcissism I may possess — and I do — I have to say, I don’t have any interest in killing 100, 000 people to prove some particular point. As it turns out, the one thing that makes people crazier than a pandemic is a big war where everyone involved looks a lot like themselves. History shows it, and more history is set to be made, potentially tragically in relation to the current circumstance. I don’t know where any number of trends may be leading, but right now, people are really just showing themselves to be talking monkeys. There’s no escaping it. Sometimes we are just better at covering it up than other times.
The libertarianism of my youth pokes its head up and reminds me, “people, in groups, are bonkers.”
