For those who didn't see it, this post started with a Twitter discussion.
Somebody posted a picture of a little orphan kissing a memorial, reportedly raised in memory of her father, a Ukrainian soldier killed fighting the Russian invaders.
It's so often the noncombatants, the completely innocent victims, who lose most in wars. The children who will never have fathers--or, in some cases, even mothers. The animals. The disabled people who lose their assistants and often their pensions...
I typed, irritably, that the Ukrainians, and the Russians, should just stop fighting already.
I take no sides in foreign wars. Europeans have been feuding about which tribe owns what for thousands of years. Since land and landmarks have changed hands so often, two, three, or more tribes can claim some ancestral right to them now. Often it's not even the actual ownership of the land that's in dispute--the land belongs to some mixed-breed border family--but where the international borderline should be drawn around it. It's easy to say "Ask the people who live there" but in practice there may not even be a clear consensus among them. Some people in Alsace consider themselves French, and some consider themselves German. Sometimes the people work out their own arrangement: Switzerland is a border territory where people of German, French, and Italian descent have at least been able to agree to live in peace with each other, neutrality toward other nations, and tolerance of one another's cultures and languages, for hundreds of years.
Ukraine has been its own nation for about thirty years on this go-around, and at various times in the past. It has not been one consistently for very long. The people look like other Northern Europeans, including those in western Russia. They speak a language that has often been considered a dialect of Russian; spelling words with double Y's can't change that. Their border disputes with Russia are the sort of thing American liberals have been told are none of America's business. The United States prospered during the Cold War years when we weren't officially on speaking terms with either Ukraine or Russia; we don't have crucial economic ties to either country. We have no right and no reason to hold opinions about the issue of their war.
But surely we have a right to deplore Russia's aggressive acts of war against Ukraine? We do. Putin does not seem to care how much he's deplored, or even detested. He seems to want to be considered a Christian, so he must know how those who "take the sword, shall perish."
What we did about Russia's aggressive, greedy acts of war, in the past, eventually worked. That was the Cold War. Very boring, very slow, but bloodless and effective. It could start over. European nations that stand to lose a lot more than we do have already started it. What would we have to give up? Authentic vodka? Germany was at least threatening to give up heat. Germany is not a tropical country.
What the current administration is doing is encouraging Ukraine in what appears to be an unwinnable war. I can think of ways this policy might make some sort of sense. So can you, if you think about it long enough. These are not pleasant thoughts. On the theory that the Commander-in-Chief may have access to information I don't have, which information may make it reasonable to weaponize Ukraine, I'll try to refrain from writing any more about this subject, and just say I'm anti-war, as a general state of being, like being righthanded.
Ooohhh, ooohhh, don't I even caaaare about the poor dear little orphan? Of course I do. How can you not care about orphans? So, when prodded about this question of caring about orphans, I said the best way to reduce the number of future orphans would be for Ukraine just to surrender--for now--and let Cold War II do, slowly but effectively, what World War III seems unlikely to do. That's obviously not what they want to do; it might not even be what I'd want to do; it's what's likely to prevent their children from being orphans.
When our President starts blathering about nuclear war with Russia...er, well, actually they did build the biggest bomb, back in the 1970s. They nicknamed it Tsar Bomba. They exploded it on a remote arctic island and got complaints from all over northern Europe, as well as from within, and decided not to use bombs like it again. They still have the materials and blueprints to build another one and drop it on us. Of course we have the materials and blueprints to build one like it and drop that bomb on them. This strategy was called Mutual Assured Destruction. Nobody ever liked it much. Nobody has missed it.
We could build an Emperor of Bombs and drop it on Russia, and that would probably kill more Ukrainians, more painfully, than Russia has shot or blown up with non-nuclear missiles. /We could, and some unemployed young people might want to do this, send mercenary soldiers (the original freelancers actually fought with lances) to fight in this war; that would thin our rising generation--and that, too, would cost a lot of lives in Ukraine, not even counting the ones that could potentially be lost to the fact that to us Ukrainians and Russians look pretty much alike. In Vietnam our troops blew up some of the houses and towns they were supposedly there to protect, simply because they all looked pretty much alike.
Belligerent people or tribes don't always respect conditions of surrender, but that would immediately reduce the loss of Ukrainian lives. If staying alive is their goal, they might want to consider this option.
Should people just surrender to inexcusable abuses of their natural rights? History does record cases where God seems to have intervened to bless people who chose to stop fighting in order to survive. The Cherokee Nation greeted British and European immigrants with courtesy, made Americans of them, and then found themselves under attack. The pretext was that a hothead of Scotch and Shawnee origins, whose name, Robert Bench, was corrupted into "Chief Benge," was inciting aggrieved Cherokees to attack English settlements. The real motive was to populate what became the south-central States with more British and European immigrants, from whom the federal government could extract more money faster.
So war was declared. Cherokee warriors fought bravely and, on the whole, honorably but were defeated by sheer numbers anyway. They surrendered, on abominable terms, in order to avert the kind of complete genocide other Native American groups were suffering. Families like mine were broken up; my own personal ancestors, who were English-speaking Christians by 1820, stayed where they were; some of the aunts, uncles, and cousins went to Oklahoma. "Promised them land for as long as the grass grows and the water flows, then sent them to land that had neither," was Will Rogers' phrase.
The Cherokee people were not what might be called happy about this situation. Among other things, despite Chief John Ross telling them to stay out of the White people's war, they had their own little Confederate army--feared and avoided by other Confederates, and thus the last Confederate group to surrender at the end of that war. Oklahoma was not a Confederate State and probably would not have been admitted as one, but that was not the point. The point was that a lot of Cherokee men welcomed a pretext for killing Yankees.
But most Cherokee people got on with their lives in Oklahoma, trying to live peaceably with all, and it may be that their prayers were answered. Their share of the flat dry land was the part with most of the oil. While other indigenous groups lived in poverty, and still do, Cherokee people were oilmen. Their wealth helped reduce the bitterness White Americans felt about their losses in the war, and so the two nations coexist in peace today. While some Native American groups wisecrack about the genetic diversity found in the Cherokee Nation, it's also a matter of historical fact that Cherokees have done a lot to equalize civil rights for those other groups.
In fact Americans have managed to resolve conflicts without war against any other English-speaking country, at least, since Stand Watie surrendered in the summer of 1865. We've not done so well with people whose languages are foreign to us, including several indigenous nations further west who had not generally learned English even into the 1880s; but we have managed to remember that "Mother England" and "her" other "children"-nations are civilized human beings, just like us, with whom peace is possible.
The Spanish-speaking countries have also done fairly well at not making war on one another for a nice long time. They have internal disputes and internal crime, instead. North and South America could probably coexist on friendlier terms than we now do, but we're doing much better at maintaining peace than Europe, the home of the United Nations and the land of constant war.
So some Twit had to ask: "If Mexico invaded Virginia..."
Time out for laughter. Mexico is not and has never been an aggressive nation. They are civilized. There are those, like Pat Buchanan, who feel that they have invaded Virginia, but never in a violent way. They came up to work, decided they could stand our damp climate, bought houses and invited all their friends and relatives to come here in search of better-paying jobs. On the whole I think they've shown themselves to be good neighbors. We benefit from that kind of "invasion," I say, even if Pat Buchanan thinks we should all be eating corned beef instead of tacos, playing pianos instead of guitars.
The only trouble is that the supply of better-paying jobs is drying up. Now, though there are still a few Mexican-Americans doing good cheap work--farmers, carpenters, mechanics, nurses, translators--the "jobs" new immigrants are finding increasingly involve vice if not crime. Unless they are in fact targets of homicidal violence, or refugees from places wiped out by natural disasters, new immigrants are not likely to find better lives here than they have at home.
But suppose, hypothetically, that Mexico did start trying to take over other countries in the bad old European tradition. They have no historical claim on Virginia (the southwestern States, maybe) but they decide to take over Virginia just because they want the land. So they start rolling up in tanks--what's been happening in all the other States they had to roll through to get here is not specified--shooting people and demanding half the land.
The Twit specified that this new wave of Mexican bullies killed my parents and siblings. If the Twit had studied this web site the Twit would have known why that would be hard to do. My parents and brother are already dead. My adoptive brother went back to India. My adoptive sister is one of those Mexican-Americans who've made themselves welcome here. So that leaves only my natural sister. So basically these belligerent Mexicans want her share of our ancestral land, what's left of it.
Well, obviously they're not as intelligent as the average Mexican, who would have done enough planning to know that my depressive natural sister does not appreciate peace and quiet, hard work, or my company. She likes to crank up the volume to a point that hurts my ears, without guilt. She's too hard of hearing to be a good English teacher and not deaf enough to have learned sign language, and she wailed about losing her looks twenty years ago, but she'd still make a very decorative storekeeper or secretary. She's not bilingual, but we pounded tourist-level Spanish into her as a child. If these Mexicans had any sense they wouldn't kill her; they'd snap her up. I'd be grateful for any help toward securing her old age. People who found her a job and kept her on the job would be welcome to use her bedroom while building their own house.
Of course Mexicans are like other Americans: not all of them are as nice as most of them are. However, the bad kind of Mexicans are usually described sneaking around in small groups and shooting individual enemies in the back, having neither the resources nor any desire to start a war.
But maybe these new, hostile Mexicans are first-generation immigrants from Putin's army; maybe the rest of the Russian people woke up and gave Putin and his army the Order of the Boot. Maybe these Mexicans just want to do things the Russian way. So they swarm out of these tanks brandishing Kalashnikovas and screaming, "Oye, vieja, sientate a la mesa para negociar la division de tu propriedad, en ese momento, o te fusilamos!"
And I never understand things said rapidly on the first try, even when they are things that make sense in real life, so quite by accident I say, "Que? Que quieres decir? Por favor, sientense aqui para explicar," so they sit down and explain, Putin-style, that they're taking over the United States by force, they demand half of my land, and if I refuse they're going to start the Third World War.
"What about the other two million home owners in Virginia? What are they saying?"
"Leave them out of this, vieja! This hypothetical exercise is all about you! We have nuclear bombs aimed at Virginia now and if you, writer known as Priscilla King, don't sign over half of your land we will drop them. But you get to choose which half of the land."
I find it very difficult to imagine how I could be persuaded that this could possibly be happening, but maybe that came in the part about how they got through Tennessee, which was left out. This is not the way Putin is actually dealing with Ukrainians, nor is it the way any sane person would want to become anybody's new neighbor, even if he could not become the person's new honorary nephew just by getting the person's sister to stay on a job with retirement benefits.
But, hypothetically...Right. If these Mexicans have already taken the insane Putin-style approach to my sister, obviously I don't like or trust them, as would be the case if they just gave her a job. I don't really want new neighbors but, if they're not going to spray poison or start forest fires, I might get some actual benefit from having them. I definitely don't want, won't benefit from, nuclear war.
What do I say in this unlikely situation? "The half without the house on it, obviously. If you have a trailer, you can park it right over there. Bienvenidos, vecinos."
After which, maybe I leave, maybe they leave, maybe they bite themselves and die of rabies, maybe they shoot me in the back--who knows. This whole scenario is so absurd. So not the way any sane American, North or South, would ever try to accomplish anything. Maybe we just wake up.
War is not a sane way to accomplish anything, except population control, which can be achieved in more pleasant ways, like safe sex. War is illogical and unnatural and stupid and counterproductive and wrong in every possible way.
But I just know this Twit's next question will be, "So why do you want to bother building a wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States, if they're civilized people and good neighbors?" Some things Europeans just don't seem able to understand.
Sigh.
I personally don't want the wall. Law enforcement people on both sides of the border want the wall because they're tired of criminals skipping across the border just to make their job difficult. I think the wall's a boondoggle but likely to provide more honest and temporary employment than some other boondoggles have been.
I personally don't worry about illegal immigrants as much as some people seem to do, either, though I do think that directing them straight to the homes of the people who are still encouraging them to come here would be a good idea. "Good morning Congressman, we understand you want more immigration into this country? Right. Your fifty immigrants are waiting in the bus outside. Thirty from Spanish-speaking countries--you do speak Spanish, don't you?-and twenty from I-can't-understand-a-word-they-say but they look like the United Nations. They have all been issued tents and will be camping on your block until you can find jobs and homes for them. Good luck with the jobs because, until they're earning decent wages with benefits, any medical bills they incur will be coming to you! One of them looks about ready to give birth and two more are pregnant. Of course thirteen of them are children and the TV news crew will be around tonight to find out which schools you've chosen for them." \
I personally have rented rooms in houses where Spanish was the house language. If I were living in a place where young people came to look for jobs, and people wanted to rent rooms from me, I'd rent rooms to legal visitors or immigrants from Mexico.
I think international travel and education are good things, and it's always interesting to have visitors from other countries. Unfortunately, although North America was a Land of Opportunity for a long time, it's filled up. Regardless of what people look like or even how fluently they speak English, the opportunities for corporate career jobs have been decimated by computer technology. Nobody should consider a change of address, for the purposes of seeking a job or promotion, until a contract guaranteeing the said job or promotion has been signed.
"So, in order to prevent a nuclear war, you'd let some Mexicans you had reasons to dislike and distrust put a trailer on your property, but, merely in order to let some Mexicans whose company you might even enjoy compete with U.S. citizens for burger-flipping and floor-mopping jobs, you'd tell them to go back to Mexico?" someone may reasonably ask.
Right. There is something deeply messed up about the idea of people surrendering to an act of war in order to prevent the destruction of most of the planet, and yet resisting an act of simple ambition...but what's wrong here is the whole idiotic, atavistic idea of war, not the idea that people should generally stay where their families are and build better communities and economies there.
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