This is not only a metaphor.
I wonder what the members of this forum think about the war which has just started in Europe.
I am not even going to try to pretend that I understand what is going on—all the historical, geopolitical, and economic drivers, let alone the meta-modern meta-perspectival sense-making meta-meaning, nor could I predict what is going to happen next…
Is this a world-historical moment?
Are we at the beginning of WW3?
Or is this just another dramatic chess move in the long endgame of European history?
And, oh how I love thee, sanctions…
Hasn’t it already been assumed that Ukraine would be sacrificed?
And before there was peace and now there is war.
And where was there peace?
And this is why Ukraine was so important to the Trump presidency, yes?
And it has something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop, right?
And why Trump was pulling the US out of NATO…
And why wouldn’t Russia want a buffer between itself and the rest of Europe, after Napoleon, WW2, and Serbia in the 1990s?
And China has helpfully volunteered to buy up Russia’s wheat.
And the people of Ukraine, and the neighboring (former Soviet-bloc) countries…
Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Estonia…
I imagine the people, and ancestral memories well up…
My father’s family, fleeing their home in Italy during WW2…
And my family in El Salvador in the 1980s’…
And all the people I know whose families have fled from war…
We all have ancestral memories. We might know what it’s like to be Ukraine right now. We can feel it through the global nervous system of the world wide web.
And I remember when the US invaded Iraq, I was in high school and it was a classmate’s 16th birthday, and I was invited, which was an anomaly because he was a good-looking, popular kid, and I didn’t feel I belonged in his peer group, but we played soccer together and I think that’s why, and we all ate out at an Applebees or someplace like that, and there was a TV on the wall, and CNN, and there was the video of the tomahawk missiles streaking and bright explosions of ambiguous targets blowing up in the Iraqi desert, and the public was allayed with talk of “smart bombs,” which were surely the precursors of our current smart devices.
And I remember watching GW Bush’s blustering, pathetic speeches on TV—and all the maneuvering at the UN, and Colin Powell, and so-called world leaders making big vapid statements, all the justifications, rationalizations, and posturing. Something like 200,000 people violently killed, many more of secondary causes. And nowadays the tweeting-heads are tweeting, for the warzone extends into the metaverse.
And how my dad in his later years used to watch RT television, which was blatantly Russian propaganda, obviously, as much as FOX News and CNN are US/American or globalist propaganda, and I would wonder: how could they even allow that on cable TV in the US? However, it did present an alternative narrative, which (among other irruptions in the media) helped to dislodge the hegemony of the US/American story.
There is nobody at the wheel.
The people of Ukraine are being thrown under the bus.
Putin asserts Russia’s will to power.
The price of oil has shot up to over $100 a barrel. The utterly boring markets are reacting.
Some pipeline won’t be built. Various dubious international deals and financial arrangements are being scuttled. And?
What is the alternative? What could possibly be done that wouldn’t risk a much wider conflict?
I am an artist. I exist in the same world as Ukraine, and as you. I am one and many bodies. I have one and many voices. I am thinking out loud, so that thinking might happen. Are we thinking yet?
How do you all understand what’s happening in Ukraine, and what this means for us (as humanity, as Spirit, as cosmic consciousness incarnate in world history) or for you?
