Mother Russia and the Matter of Growth.

I often ask myself why I get so hot under the collar about the war in Ukraine. It’s partly the obvious reaction of an empath to the suffering of the innocent, as it is in other conflicts, but it goes a little deeper than that.

I find it greatly disheartening that people like Putin – and others – can still wield power in the affairs of the world. After at least 100,000 years of being on this planet, the human race still refuses to grow up. Too many people still allow themselves to be swayed by emotive rhetoric which rants wildly on feeble matters like patriotism and the scourge of traitors, while failing to see through it all and ask the obvious question: if being a traitor matters so much, who is the real traitor here?

Under Putin, Mother Russia has become a dishevelled and dark hearted old hag sitting in her hut on chicken’s legs. She has become Baba Jaga, largely isolated from the affairs of the world and reviled by most of its inhabitants. Only other tyrants in other states still regard Mother Russia as a sister. (Baba Jaga had sisters, too.) And this is my own rhetoric, I know, but at least it’s honestly intentioned. That’s the difference.

And so I continue to wonder whether the human race will ever grow up, and I wonder whether it isn’t supposed to. Maybe the ways of the world are supposed to be like this in order to teach the more enlightened a few lessons they need to learn in order to progress. How can I know?

Meanwhile, the innocent continue to suffer and the tyrant continues to persuade the feeble minded of his rightness. Mother Russia continues to wallow in the darkness of her deep forest, and that disappoints me because I’d allowed myself to believe that the Cold War was over and we could now be good neighbours at last. And I’m aware that nothing I say is going to make a blind bit of difference, but I felt like saying it anyway. (And this post was made as an alternative to the one I was going to make about how weak and feeble I've become, in both mind and body, and why I find this lamentable state of affairs a matter of concern.)