Ukraine contrasts
Dear Editor, Amid the cataclysmic return of war to Europe, I am struck by the dazzlingly sharp contrasts in human behaviour exhibited in the past fortnight: A power hungry dictator with his generals and advisers gathered around him in a sumptuous government building, planning his next eagerly anticipated move; a comedian-turned politician with his advisers in a city under siege, his own life at severe risk even as his beloved country is pummelled by missiles, bombs and bullets.
Aggressors rolling into a land that isn’t theirs; and defenders willing to give their lives to safeguard the futures of loved ones and people they’ve never met.
War brings out the very worst and the very best in people. We hear of atrocities, of hospitals being bombed; of heartbreak beyond measure as the invasion takes its mind-boggling toll... but then we see the life-savers; non-combatants who rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield and drive them away in their own cars to get them medical attention, the volunteers helping to ease the plight of the refugees from this war who, like those of previous conflicts, have been cast adrift from what had been normal lives into a world of fear and uncertainty, cut off from families and friends because a narcissistic politician wants to make an audacious land grab without giving a thought for the human cost of war.
Something else struck me too. I think we in Ireland can learn from the way Ukrainians treat their pets. I was just listening to a woman recount how she prioritised her cat over her laptop. She said she could always get another laptop, but her cat meant the world to her. The presence of all those frightened little cats and dogs gazing bewilderedly from under the arms of so many innocent war victims, contrasts starkly with how animals are casually discarded in this country, abandoned for the flimsiest of reasons.
I hope the Ukrainians, against all the seeming odds, can prevail in their life and death struggle. I also hope that, maybe, when this living nightmare for that proud and heroic nation is over, war will be consigned forever to the history books.
On past experience, though, I suspect that this won’t happen. It’s now, I fear, only a question of what the planet’s ultimate cause of death will be: war sparked by hateful, greedy humans... or human-generated climate change.
Like the Ukrainian cats, we are a species in immediate need of rescuing. Thanking you,
John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street,
Callan, Co. Kilkenny.