That Tears Should Drown the World
I never understood how lonely war could be, until now. Friends who’ve been in the military warned me, and I thought I heard them, but not really. I’m 4500 miles away from Kyiv, sitting in the courtyard of the Charles Hotel, across from Harvard’s Kennedy School. It’s a clear, sunny day in late June. A group of women are doing their Pilates exercises in the adjacent courtyard. The world looks so normal.
The truth is I’m here in Cambridge in body only. My mind is with my friends and their families across Ukraine. My own family, in Lviv, are relatively safe though bombs have fallen there as recently as this morning. Friends in Kharkiv are never safe, however. And the soldiers fighting on the front lines come from all over Ukraine.
I have no doubt that you, reader, know this. My challenge is to get you to care just a little bit more, just enough to get you to call your congressperson or make a donation to Razom (https://www.razomforukraine.org) or just signal to the people under siege that you are with them in any way you can. Because solidarity matters.
I know this from speaking to people even as they are being bombed. The knowledge that they are on our radar, that the world remains with them, matters a great deal even as the landscape around them goes up in smoke. They’ve told me so themselves.
Unfortunately, the very people who, outraged by the reports of rape and abduction, of indiscriminate slaughter, might be inclined to rally in support of helpless civilians are otherwise engaged. They are (rightly) furious at the Supreme Court, outraged at what they’ve heard during the January 6th hearings, appalled by the spate of mass shootings across our nation. As the war drags on they’ve begun to turn away from it — and from me. I see it in the diminished responses I receive to war-related materials I send out. I sense friends girding themselves for more unpleasant news whenever we meet. They say the right things, but they can’t wait to get away or change the subject.
And I understand. Because what can they — what can I — do, really? What can be said that will make a difference to what’s happening on the ground? What can any of us not immediately affected by the genocide unfolding before our eyes do? Hasn’t the U.S. government already been incredibly generous?
They have. Bless them, they have. Most US support is going to pay for desperately needed military supplies of course. But what I’ve learned — what I should have known, because my refugee parents had already gone through this during WWII — is that the ripple effects of a war are endless. We hear about the way it affects us in the West — delays in the supply chain leading to rising prices for gas, in the supermarkets. War is an inconvenience for us, that’s for sure.
But stop to consider what it means when 13 million people are displaced from their homes. It means they no longer have anywhere to live. It means they have forsaken or lost their jobs. Often it means that the places where they worked have been reduced to rubble.
Most citizens of Ukraine would normally be on vacation now. Instead they’re huddled in bomb shelters, where they’re giving birth, or conducting classes inside steel plants so that their children can graduate on time, or simply weeping. They’re gathering supplies to send to the under-equipped army on the front lines — I’ve seen fundraisers aimed at soliciting money for everything from night vision goggles to walkie talkies to Kevlar vests. They’re driving cross country, risking everything, to get the supplies to their husbands and brothers and sisters and parents.
Let me make this more concrete by focusing on the economic fallout for an industry in which I’ve worked my entire life. According to Oleksandr Afonin, President of the Ukrainian Association of Booksellers and Publishers, some 2500 booksellers and publishing professionals have lost their livelihoods. That means they have no way to support themselves or their families — and no sense of when the situation might return to normal. Salaries vary from region to region, years of service etc., generally falling within the range of $300 to $1,000/month. To replace them at the lowest possible level of $300/month would require a minimum of $750,000/month. Pocket change for a billionaire.*
No dollar amount can ever be placed on what this war has already cost in human terms, never mind the devastation to infrastructure and collateral damage to the environment. The least we can do is to help mitigate the suffering of the millions rendered jobless, homeless, practically overnight.
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*The annual interest on 1 billion dollars at 3% is approximately 30 million dollars.
