As I watched the news about the US-Russian meeting to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine, I couldn’t but help think how God-awful human beings can be. There sat our Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, with others amid lavish surroundings in Saudi Arabia to allegedly discuss ending the brutal three year war that has killed millions of people, Russians as well as Ukrainians. The contrast of the opulence with countless photos of the death and destruction suffered in Ukraine painfully reminded me that it’s always the people who suffer, who lose their lives to the folly of the statecraft of the elite and well-heeled “leaders”of our countries. There was no pain around that negotiating table; it was in the streets of Kiev and countless Ukrainian villages. There were only fancy carbonated water bottles, flowers and an unconscious sense of superiority.
I found the published agenda for the initial meeting to be both eye-opening and repugnant. Top of the list was the statement about reopening relationships between the United States and Russia to reestablish full diplomatic missions in Moscow and Washington. Further, more astonishing was the interest expressed to explore economic opportunities for both countries, a goal hardly pertinent to ending the most bloody conflict in Europe since Word War II. In short, the opening discussions revealed that Ukraine was simply a pawn in a game between the United States and Russia motivated by power and greed. Hollow words spoken by hollow men as the killings continue.
I can’t help myself because it is in times like this that I aways ask what kind of people act like this. Didn’t they have decent moms and dads who taught them differently, didn’t they listen to the sermons of their religious leaders, don’t they see and understand the cruelty of their indifference and the inevitable failure of their machinations?
And it is at times like this that I question my career studying and teaching history. Increasingly, I am forced to acknowledge that it is the past that is committed to the dustbin of history in the face of current exigencies by those who have it in their power to affect change.