At 30 years old, I can now say I’ve seen more occurrences in this life than was ever thought. War? It was a thing of the past, filmed in black and white, fought by men of a different generation – men who lived a harden life as a product of the horrors they saw oversees. Then 9/11 happened and it wasn’t in black and white anymore. It was our families leaving, our job to keep up morale, our care packages, and grew to be our responsibility to educate on post-war life with a deeper understanding of mental health. Then you move to politically hostile climates. We were just dead wrong about that. There was nothing to show that we had moved to a civil world in politics, just blind hopes of naivety. Economic destabilization? I will admit to being a lay person on the verbiage of economic woes, but I am now well versed in the life of “makin’ it work”, which I believe is the reality of more people than the internet will allow us to believe. The internet is a safe haven of building this view of world through rose colored glasses where everyone is doing well and if they’re not, there’s someone there to help. This virtual lie plagues the minds of the up-and-coming generations who forget the backbones of society come from the hard work of men and women who wanted a better world for future generations. Have we given them their dreams? I think in some ways the answer is yes but, in many ways, we’ve failed them. Those generations wanted the comfortable life for their children and grandchildren they didn’t have but we got too comfortable with that silver spoon and proverbial platter. Moving on, what about plagues? How could we have a plague worse than flu season? We’ve got vaccines for everything, right? 2 years with a notable percentage of people in quarantine, dying at rates unprecedented in my own lifetime proved that wrong. I thought the world of medicine had advanced beyond a life of uncontrollable viruses. Alas, statistics are showing that every person alive is connected to someone who lost a battle with Covid despite all efforts to fight. I’d venture to say it was a pivotal battle lost but there’s still hope for the war on covid (I mean we have wars on everything else, why not this?)
But let’s move on to the humanity of the world today and often the lack thereof. As I sit, the numbers on the news are 2.6 million fled their homes and lives in Ukraine. Most of these numbers are women, children, and the elderly. People where I live are covering their eyes and putting their heads in the sand with the mindset of “we’ll send help afterwards but let them settle their own problems” and “not happening here, not my problem except my bills have all gone up so I’m mad”. The ignorance of those people is infuriating to me personally. 2.6 million women, children, and elderly with no homes, no jobs, and missing the fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, and friends between the ages of 18 and 60 and you’re simply posting a tiktok about the gas prices affecting your bottom line. I don’t mean to belittle the problems people have because they are very real, and it does deeply affect the quality of life for each and every person. But to lose sight of the bigger picture is irresponsible. This is what brings the loss of humanity.
Do not mistake my words for blame. Please regard them as accountability. We are accountable not as Americans but as humans to protect the fundamental rights of human lives across the world. It’s a responsibility that overwhelms and overstimulates if you think too long about it but, in the words of Frozen 2, just do the next right thing. If your reach only extends to a neighbor you can help, then help them. If your reach can reach to the humanitarian and volunteer efforts in Poland and Hungary as they take on the droves of refugees, then send all efforts you can. Daily life has stopped in a large percentage of Europe. They’re not going to work or school, not seeing their friends or playing in the streets. They’re not going out to supper to celebrate birthdays. They are finding a new sense of self as a patriot and protector, picking up the guns offered to defend their homes. So often on the news I’ve heard about the requests for the NATO powers to help but now those requests have changed just a bit. President Zelensky is only asking for more ammunition because he knows his people are strong enough. The president doesn’t want to put anyone in harm’s way outside of the Ukrainian nation, but he has to have the resources to fight in order to win. The unfortunate truth is this: the works of mad men only become more dangerous when they don’t get their way and Putin is proving to be a mad man – lying to his own country about what’s happening, censoring what they see and read about Ukraine. Sane leaders don’t hide their actions; they don’t detain protestors who fight for human rights of their neighbors.
Again, I will never put on a facade of being highly educated in the ways of economics or war. I’m only an opinion from a kitchen counter in Moody, AL. But I will also take up these identities: a bleeding heart for the families in distress as I know the sacrifices I would make without a second thought for my own family, a woman living in prayer for the women, mothers, daughters, and caretakers who have to find a strength they didn’t know they had, an employee willing to shift my view of work to combat the rising prices so that we can continue to choke the strain on Russian economic structure, the wife who knows that anything viewed as an escalation by a NATO power in the eyes of a mad man will risk the likelihood of a beginning to a third World War, of which my husband could meet the demographics of those called to arms. These are hard realities and ones we have to recognize.
I implore those around me to take one simple step – change your algorithms to reflect truths of what’s happening in the world and to show the stories of people doing good for the infirmed, the displaced, the lonely, the scared, the separated, the neighbors. We have control of the information we take in so be smart about what information you get. Truths are most often found in websites that end in .org, .edu, and .gov so don’t be fooled by far left or far right sources that reflect an agenda. Align your information with your moral compass and let that compass be led by love, faith, and the justice our world needs. Reach your neighbors or reach the other side of the world but affect something enough to make it better than you found it.
experiences of life 