Why We Should Care

Why should we care about Ukraine? This post keeps going around my social media after Putin has invaded, and, while it gives some helpful information situating Ukraine in the larger world, it makes me super uncomfortable. Why should we care about Ukraine? Because we should care any time a child is living in a place where there is shelling. Because we should care anytime politicians, who will experience not an ounce of discomfort, put people in their country at risk of hunger due to sanctions and at risk of retaliatory violence. Because we should care anytime nationalism poisons a country to enact violence against others.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina during the genocide in the 1990s, there was a joke about a man who decided to be proactive and dig his own grave. But even once he hit six feet, he kept digging. Somebody walking by asked him why, and he said, “Maybe if I find oil, the USA will care about what is happening here.”

The eradication of violence, the protection of children- these are the reasons why we should care about Ukraine or anywhere else for that matter- not its size or exports or whatever. And the eradication of violence and protection of children should be something we are focusing on the USA, where states like Texas are passing laws that do violence to trans children and that curtail our RIGHT to vote (voting in this country is a right, not a privilege), and where America First policies and flag worship have been so embraced that those seeking asylum are turned away and hate crimes have risen. Nationalism is a poison, and we have to draw it out here and everywhere.