As we start a new year full of uncertainty but tooled up with a heightened sense of hope, my biggest wish is that we try to genuinely rid ourselves of fear and refuse to be pushed into not fully living the one life we are certain to have on this planet.
The last year was a killing field, literally, and having yet another birthday, even after having perfected the art of back counting, demands awareness of how life is lived and how much time remains for learning how to do it well. Since February of 2022 we have received a lesson in courage from the people of Ukraine who were suddenly attacked by neighbouring Russia in an audacious land grab. The Ukrainians stand as monuments. That “war” – a misnomer in my opinion – has been prolonged beyond anyone’s expectations and we have all lived it in an unprecedented way. The enormity in scale of a particular humanitarian crisis has never been so widely reported or viewed internationally. We have witnessed wall-to-wall footage of millions of people fleeing their country as Russian bombs fell and continue to fall and rockets explode in the night sky. We have seen amazing aerial shots of lines of the invader’s tanks being routed and of mass graves in once quiet provincial Ukrainian towns, the tears and the personal loss. The experience of war most of us had, till this conflict on the European continent, is the cine version of fully-fledged ones, such as WWI and WWII, in which every aspect of life is suborned to the national defence effort, but the reports from Ukraine show women in the cities and towns far away from the fighting zones with their faces fully made up, wearing fashion jewellery, and people living apparently routine lives, alongside the destruction and savagery of the frontline. It is compelling to see those dolled up women cry through their mascara for their country and countrymen and lament their predicament.
It is a reality which is difficult for us to fully comprehend but we are helped by Ukrainians using social media to post their own images from everywhere in Ukraine, and that brand of citizen journalism has brought another layer of understanding of the atrocities and the haphazardness of life. It seems somehow paradoxical that while it is a story of hell and ruination, the extensive and varied coverage has had the effect of normalising armed conflict, even sanitising it. We, far away, might be lulled into putting the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the back burner but it is the biggest cause of apprehension for many and the source of the greatest instability for the world, notwithstanding developments in Taiwan and elsewhere.
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Underlying the blanket international media coverage must be the terrible fear that the US is conducting a surrogate war with Russia in Ukraine that could yet erupt into a full-blown European confrontation between nuclearised countries. If we never understood what NATO was or its significance we certainly all do now, and it is down to the exceptional access tel
