A Post from My Drafts Archive: "Greed Spills Over"
"Ukrainians are in our hearts. But today something hopeful happened in our county." -- I wrote this post on February 24, 2022 and for some reason didn't publish it.
Greed for power has finally burst its containers as Putin’s war on Ukraine fills the news this morning, Thursday, February 24, 2022.
I think of Putin as a machine, so I’m searching for the human story. I’m worried about the people there. The story that I can’t forget was in The Guardian this morning.
Dennis Ougrin, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at Queen Mary University of London, was eager to get back to Ukraine to help with what he said would be the inevitable toll on his country’s very youngest as a result of the Russian bombardment.
“It’s horrific but, as we know from Russian actions before, the type of offensive they undertake really strikes fear into children in particular. I’m thinking the children in Ukrainian orphanages who’ve had to take shelter underground while missile and artillery attacks take place,” he said.
Also I’ve been worried for us over here, about the sides Americans are taking.
Incredibly, Americans in our Congress and in other high offices are siding with Putin over the Russian war on Ukraine. The word “treason” has been flying free for several years now, never landing on certain members of the US Congress when I’ve been so sure it would. Will it now?
Let’s say that the bridge between Putin and humans is Tucker Carlson of Fox “News”. Carlson is a machine like Putin but still identifies with humans for business reasons.
I see he’s begun to capture the word “treason”, to add his already redefined “patriotic”.
Speaking above a chyron that read ‘Anything less than hating Putin is treason’, Carlson denounced the attempts to make Putin a ‘boogeyman’.
He said, ‘Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington told you, you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin.’
A diet of lies turns ordinary people into instruments of power.
But we can still say No to all this. We still have that right.
Have enjoyed these Postcards so much. Please keep writing.
One only has to look up the definition of a dictator to know the dangerous perils of living in a dictatorship.