Originally written March 1st, 2022
I’m not going to pretend I know a lot about Ukraine. I don’t. I possess no particularly deep or first-hand knowledge about its history, its culture, its geography or its people, outside of what I or anyone else can glean from fifteen minutes with my fingers on a keyboard and the cavern of cyberspace yawning in two dimensions across my monitor.
When I was young, I didn’t know much about China either. It’s where all the stuff with Made in China stamped on it came from, and where you’d emerge from the ground if you were a Canadian kid like me digging a hole straight through the earth. But I knew, one day, when I saw that black and white poster of a man standing firm in front of a line of tanks, that I wanted it on my wall. What was it that struck me? Some archetypical David and Goliath aspect? The bullied holding fast against the bullies? You know the image I’m talking about. We all know.
I didn’t know much about the place my grandpa came from in those days, even after I heard the stories of how he and his brother were put onto a ship as children to escape the Blitz—an Atlantic crossing, bound for Nova Scotia, as Germany rained bombs over the United Kingdom behind them. The ship that was following theirs, also filled with refugee British children, was torpedoed and sunk by an enemy submarine. That murderous decision from below the waves, the choice of one ship over the other, is the only reason I’m here to write these words. Of course, I didn’t put that together back then; I just tried to understand why someone would sink a ship full of children.
I was ignorant, too, on just about anything concerning Japan. I knew the US dropped atomic bombs on them in the Second World War. I remember a Japanese woman coming to my elementary school as a guest, telling us, we cheerful kids who had never been touched by massacre, of when she first caught sight of victims from Hiroshima fleeing the city. Her child-mind, certainly not so different from our child-minds, had perceived in that first instant that she was seeing giant roast chickens, because the people’s clothing and skin had all been burnt away, and they hobbled so that their raw thighs wouldn’t rub together. I never forgot that story. I never will. Years later, as a young man, I visited Hiroshima for myself. I tried to hold back tears at first, but wept at last in the peace park, staring up at the skeletal remains of the A-bomb dome, and at the museum, gazing at the tiniest of Sadako Sasaki’s paper cranes.
I knew nothing, really, about the atrocities committed by the Empire of Japan, but even years later, in Nagasaki, standing at the black pillar that marks the epicenter of the blast, that knowledge changed nothing. All those people didn’t deserve that death, that mutilation, that destruction, no more than the victims of the Empire had.
This is a story that humanity keeps telling itself, wrestling with, trying to parse together, debate, promote, deny, rip apart, patch back together with spit and dried blood: that it’s just the way things are, at the end of the day. So sad. So tragic. So historical, in the past, somewhere else, not here, not me, not right now, maybe not ever. Not my problem.
Why even go on with these stories? The world is rife with them. Where hasn’t human blood been shed by other humans? Where hasn’t aggression and slaughter occurred? At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, the walls are filled with black and white photographs that the Khmer Rouge army took of their civilian prisoners. Men, women, children. They look fearful, miserable, imploring. No one smiles. Their eyes stare into yours from across the decades—through a lens barrel as discarded and forgotten as their restless bones—frozen, begging you, anyone, anywhere, to save them, to help, to not let the men behind the camera do whatever they will next. And you can do nothing. Those people were gone before you ever set foot in that city, before you ever got off the plane in Cambodia, and possibly before you were even born. You will never know them. No one will. And they were robbed of knowing anything, forever. I still see those faces a decade later. Those eyes were seared into my memory, my being, and will persist as long as my mind does.
You, Writer, what does this have to do with Russia invading Ukraine? I get it if you’re asking that. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself all this time. But the thing I’m starting to see is that it all has to do with Russia invading Ukraine. Every act of violence, of domination, of terror and destruction wrought by one group of people upon another. We’re walking in circles, this species—coiling upward, technologically, while from the top looking down or the bottom looking up, yes, it’s all just circles.
Let’s not look at this coil of human history from the bottom or the top or the side right now. Let’s stand right on it, at our place and time, just like we usually do. What you may recall is something like this: foreboding stories in the media about Russian troops amassing at the Ukrainian border. More and more showed up. Not long ago, you checked the news and heard that Russia had invaded. Blasts were heard in Kyiv and other cities, then fighting began in the streets. You saw videos of missiles and explosions and tanks. Bloodied faces. Terrified people huddled in subway stations serving as bomb shelters. Volodymyr Zelensky defiant, taking up arms, ready to fight for his country. David to Goliath. The bullied standing up to the bullies. Tank man to the tanks.
You may have posted or considered posting the Ukrainian flag on social media. You may have expressed your views online about this mess. An unprecedented coalition of sanctions issued forth from much of the industrialized world, anything to avoid active military intervention from abroad, because presumably even the most eager war hawks know where that could lead. And then, when the talk began of Putin and his nuclear threats, your blood may have run cold. This is real. This is war, right before us, with a madman issuing orders and all the chance of it escalating to heights of destruction and untold misery not seen in our lifetimes. There’s the coil, when we look down. That coil along which, at some point behind and below, we split the atom. Not that it stopped there. Why, you ask yourself, does this species bend its mental prowess around shaping ways to slaughter its own?
I’ll stop pretending I’m in your head, because I’m not. I’m telling a story to you and to myself. That’s what I usually do: tell stories.
I don’t have an answer to the question that I just posed. I could put on my magical hypothesis hat and tap away at my keyboard right now about evolution and scarcity of resources and territoriality and nationalism, as if I know something about all this. But I don’t. Just like I don’t know a lot about Ukraine. But there’s a story there, and it’s the one that matters, because it’s a story that’s as real as the quality of hug you get from someone who loves you.
Let’s go back to the winding coil, zoomed in now to a fraction of it as small as a human life—the space that life occupies, in a tapestry as grand as all human civilization, and a blue marble waltzing in a dance of gravity around our star, on the spiral arm of a shimmering galaxy in a vast cosmos. We’re still watching that news about Ukraine. I see their eyes: sorrow, terror, desperation. A six-year-old girl, hit by mortar fire, dying, frantic chest compressions not working, skin bloodlessly pale, now dead, body shrouded by her own jacket, left on a hospital table. She was probably laughing and happy, carefree, all of life stretched out ahead of her only a week ago from the time of writing, about the same age as my grandfather on that Atlantic crossing from England, another ship of children just like him sinking into the cold implacable blue of history.
I see human forms in the streets, in those subway tunnel shelters, in tanks, burned to death at roadsides. They all look the same once they’re burned like that. Russian or Ukrainian, you could never tell. Yemeni or Ethiopian, Burmese or Afghani; let your eyes relax, blur out the fine details, and you’re left with bodies. Human forms. They are us and we are them. Ukraine is where we are and where we are is Ukraine, if not now than later, if not later than before—probably both. Each of us inhabits some speck on the coil: the coil that is only circles from above or below, ever rounding back on itself from violence to peace to violence. It doesn’t take a madman. Putin didn’t exist 70 years ago, and yet humanity knew war time and again. We knew slaughter. We knew of our inhumanity and tried to hide from it, cover it up, bury it beneath the goodness in our nature. It’s something inside of us, a capacity, as much as love and hope and friendship.
The story that matters, then, is the story of each of us. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, happening before our eyes, is what happens when we collectively lose, and when we lose I look at those eyes of the victimized, those stiffened bodies of the dead, and I realize how impossibly much each of their stories mattered, for they were everything. Their lives were everything they knew, just like mine is all is know. All any of us know. They are us and we are them, billions of candle flames in the darkness of the unknown. How is it, then, that we cannot escape this circle, cannot straighten this coil? How is it we snuff out life again and again, destroy childhoods, maim, rape, uglify all which was beautiful by mere virtue of its peace?
In the novel Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières writes (via his character Carlo Piero Guercio) of Mussolini’s invasion of Greece: “I know that the Duce has made it clear that the Greek campaign was a resounding victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know what happened. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it.”
At the scale of a life, we are all the little people, each and every one of us. Together we stand ever on the upper precipice of that winding coil, always at the forefront of our species’ technological trajectory, and at any moment, with the push of a button, that could be far as we get. The stars will twinkle above us, forever beyond our reach, never to know of us because we failed to know ourselves.