As I write these words while sitting in my comfy chair in my warm house with my dogs at my feet, I remember that I am on land forcibly taken from the Dakota people. The computer, the chair, the dogs, the house, and the land I bought from white people. I am a white, middle-aged, cisgender man living at the center of the empire.
Below find two pictures. The first one shows a Ukrainian family fleeing from an unprovoked Russian assault on the people of Kyiv. The second picture is of the same family thirty seconds later, dead from Russian bombardment. The pictures were taken probably on Friday while I slept. Those are Ukrainian soldiers doing what they can for the two survivors, the father and the dog. The father is probably dead now. And the dog? It feels fear, loss, and grief as much as any of us. Who will care for it? Probably no one and that little tragedy is a drop in the flood of grief that is modern Ukraine. My guess is that the memorial visible on the left side is for the Ukrainian soldiers who died in World War II defending Russia against the Nazis.
This is not the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. Using exactly the same rationalizations and lies as Putin did this week, Stalin assaulted the Ukrainians in 1928. Their intentions were identical: acquisition of land and the destruction of people who might one day pose a problem. Nor is this the first time a violent, fearful, aggressive mob in charge of a government chewed up a neighbor to take their land and kill them by denying them the means to survive. The Germans did it to Russia. The Japanese did it to China. The English did it to Ireland and India. The US did it to the Cherokee and the Dakota nations among others. Brazil is doing it to its indigenous people today. The gamebook is wearisomely familiar.
I reject the easy and cynical response of throwing up my hands and despairing that this is simply how people treat each other. It’s not. Almost always people find ways of living peacefully side by side. Minnesota and Wisconsin. Norway and Sweden. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Costa Rica and Panama. There is, however, a limited set of definable values that prohibit people from living peacefully with their neighbors. They include: Ideas are more important than people. Nationality, race, property, and honor are meaningful concepts. Identity is possible only in the context others. Wealth and violence deliver security. Resources are a zero-sum game. Otherness is a threat. One person’s, one community’s, or one nation’s needs, aspirations, and ways are somehow unique, righter, or more noble than any others. They’re not. These values are arbitrary, acquired, and malleable. There is nothing natural or inevitable about a Russian man somewhere pressing a button and killing everybody in this family but the dog.
I was about to write that the anguish of the dog was more fierce than the anguish felt by the people of Kyiv who have lost loved ones because the dog has no way of understanding what has befallen it. But those people also probably do not understand what has befallen them. I sure don’t. I think that is because there is nothing to understand. There is only grief. And fury at the perpetrators of these crimes.
