These are the days…….

 

vladzhuk@vladzhuk

 

I’ve been staring at this page wondering how to put into words my thoughts and feelings about what’s happening in the world. It would be much more comfortable and sleep-conducive if I could believe that it’s all fake news. In the days before TV, radio, internet we would probably have known nothing about disaster until it was on our actual doorstep, but now we receive images of bombed out cities, death, destruction and mass displacement of people from their homes on a 24 hr basis. We also see the face of our planet changing with the climate and the displacement of even more people from places that are no longer habitable. There is so much suffering and we watch it all on our screens.

One particular image last night shocked me to tears: A young family caught in a bomb blast; a child in warm and colourful clothing with a little rucksack packed for the evacuation journey, lies dead alongside the others. I can’t get the picture out of my head. My grandson, Reuben, turned nine last weekend, and celebrated with his friends in a laser-zone party, shooting each other with light rays. They all de-mob’d, unscathed, to a feast of pizza and cake while in Ukraine, children like them die trying to escape a real war.

Images of dead and suffering children hit us in the stomach more than any, remaining indelibly in the recesses of the mind with the other pains, guilts and terrors. Who can forget the drowned Syrian infant washed ashore after a disastrous Mediterranean crossing, his family fleeing from a Middle-Eastern war; photos of children carried out from Hiroshima after it was nuked in WW2; children wasting away in famine; dead-eyed, traumatised children in refugee camps around the world……. The archive is a very grim memento.

“There will be wars and rumours of wars, but let ye not be troubled”, my grandmother used to quote when, as an emotional teenager, I ranted about some injustice occurring on the globe somewhere. It’s surprising that she should have been so sanguine given that she’d lived through two world wars. Her own children, my father and his sister, at the ages my own grandchildren are now, were packed onto a bus taking them away from Swansea to stay with un-known families in mid-Wales. The effects on them of their evacuation were evident into their old age. The traumas of conflict are many and they are being racked up minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year upon year, upon year.

I write this blog so as to have a record of the times I’m living in. I usually make an effort to find a lighter side to the issues I’m talking about, but I'm at a loss here. When I search for light relief in  programmes that usually have a witty take on current affairs I find the comedians also struggling to find the comedy. 

While trying to suppress the awful images of other people’s terror, my mind turns to the possibility of a nuclear disaster, and how to be ready. What provisions should we stow away? Do we need barricades of some sort? Is there a bunker nearby? What would we do with the dogs? What provisions have my sons made? (I hope they’re thinking about it, too)……. And even without being nuked I need to think about this brick and concrete yard that we call ‘the garden’ being an outside pantry. So much for my plans to pretty-up with sun beds, pretty lighting and lots of flowers.  Currently, we’re in a self-imposed semi-lockdown in order to keep our travel, food and heating costs down. What’s it called? - ‘Bunker mentality’? Something like that….It’s all ‘mental’ whatever.

Maybe someone soon will find their way into Putin’s bunker and ‘take him out’. He’s definitely ‘mental’ along with those doing his dirty work. That’s my opinion anyway, and I have tried looking at things from his point of view (I did initially anyway), by studying some history. If he believes he’s liberating anyone it’s an insane way to go about it. This morning I heard that having reneged on ceasefires to let people escape to western areas in Ukraine he has finally opened some humanitarian corridors; into Belarus and Russia! I guess he wants the Russian people to see a flood of refugees coming east and to see his efforts to liberate Ukrainians as working. As if!

None of us is perfect, individually or as nations and I do in general stand by the principle of letting “whoever is without sin throw the first stone” but, hey, this situation calls for something, some effective response, and NOW!

So……., it’s fires, floods, pestilence and suddenly again, war, unless you’re tucked up nicely somewhere safe and secure without access to any media of information. If you’re not, then you’ll be hearing phrases like ‘existential threat’, ‘the death of democracy’, ‘the rise of tyranny’ cropping up as often as the word ‘unprecedented’ did when the pandemic broke out in 2020 (and I’ve just re-iterated those phrases, given that they’re at the forefront of my mind as I write this blog post). They’re just words and if all you’re hearing is the crack of guns and the crump of bombing you won’t be much interested in what phrases are being added to the lexicon. But surely, there must be some words that would be capable of bringing an end to conflict and suffering. We must find them. 

At the moment I have no words to adequately describe this time in our history, and I’m just one of the many who are trying to do so - the documentarians, the diarists, the narrators, the archivists, the journalists, bloggers, vloggers and also the ‘conspiracy theorists’. It’s a human need to see a narrative, to know the story, but in these post-post-modern days there appears to be an acceptance of there being any number of conflicting narratives with truth elusive and ‘unnecessary’. And I ask myself whether this assessment of mine is even ‘true’ (such is logic).

I am sixty eight, born as Europe found ways to live peacefully and prosperously as it emerged  from the horrors of the early twentieth century. From my position of good fortune I have looked on as others have lived less fortunately, and now have to look on as my grandchildren’s generation faces God-only-knows what. Feeling helpless all I can do is pray for Heaven to help them all.

“Those were the days of our lives, yeah, The bad things in life were so few…..” (Queen)