Big C said:
blungld, you may have assumed I was making a point that I was not making. No, I do not believe that Ukrainians in the 21st century "want Russian occupation or control" at all. (Especially now!)
I would be interested in more of your "insider takes" about this situation, so keep dem posts coming.
Apologies if I misunderstood.
I have been getting some updates from relatives in Kiev, Lviv, and Warsaw. Watching footage on news it is surreal seeing places you have recently been being under assault. I have been heartened by Ukrainians and Poles helping one another at the moment.
My mother escaped Ukraine as a child during WWII where all the families had to decide do I go East or West? Do we have a better chance of survival under Hitler or Stalin? The families that crossed the Sanok bridge and chose Stalin mostly died. My grandfather was a judge and would have been purged so they escaped and made their way to Vienna. There are many harrowing stories about that journey and time there, but in Vienna without a place to sleep my grandmother who had been stoic and tough finally broke down. Washing a dirty diaper in a river a woman took pity on the family and invited them to stay in her apartment (these things are happening in Poland now). While staying there Nazi soldiers broke in, drunk and demanded they sleep the night there. They made my mother (a child) sleep in their room and the rest of the family spent all night assuming she would be raped or killed. Instead they kept her there because they were afraid they would be killed in their sleep. The Nazis evacuated as Americans advanced and my mother remembers nights of terror in bomb shelters. Throughout all of this my grandfather and grandmother took classes at the university. That was the importance they put on education. In a transient state during war they went and took classes. It blows my mind.
After the war, my mother spent years in an American DP camp in Belgium where the kindness of American soldiers made her love the liberators. She moved to the US and they slowly built a life. The first bed she slept in was her dorm at Ohio State. The first restaurant she ever ate at was her first date with my dad at a Howard Johnsons (which she thought was so fancy).
My parents built a life where I was completely insulated from this and I led a sheltered upper middle class life in Santa Barbara. I try and remember their story, their sacrifices, and my legacy. I never thought my mother would live to see similar things taking place in Ukraine again, and the liberating country she fled to that has given her so much now spreading Russian propaganda and an actual ex-President siding with and apologizing for Russian aggression and authoritarianism. She is stunned at what America has let itself believe and become these past five years. And what people allow themselves to just casually throw around without having lived consequences of war and fascism, and the real things that the MAGA crowd only pretends to understand and turns on its head through the misuse of words, the belief of misinformation, an undying loyalty to the tribe, and the cult of personality to a spoiled narcissist playboy with daddy issues.
The Bear will not quilt, the Bear will not dye!
