This commentary is by Ross Connelly of Hardwick, who was co-publisher and editor of The Hardwick Gazette from 1986 to 2017, when he retired.
Who does not feel horror at the Russian slaughter in Ukraine? The reality is visible. The onslaught does not offer a way to turn one’s head and look elsewhere. The inhumanity of Putin’s war is unmistakable, if any war can be seen as anything but inhumane.
Whose emotions are not heightened at the sight of a pregnant woman carried on a stretcher from a bombed hospital? There is agony at the photo of a fallen woman, her face streaked with blood, her two children lying near her, also dead from a Russian-fired mortar.
The image of an elderly woman helped to walk away from a burning apartment building, orange flames shooting from broken-out windows, brings feelings of despair. A maroon car, similar to one that might be seen often on a street in this country, is turned instantly into a black mass of twisted metal by an exploding shell from a Russian tank cannon, the civilian occupants obliterated.
More pictures and more reporting of the reality are worse.
The fleeing Ukrainians and the Ukrainians who remain in the country to fight look just like white Americans and white Europeans. From the color of their skin, to their blond and sandy hair and angular faces, to the puffy winter coats they wear, they look just like “us.”
It is easy to come to the aid of people who look like “us.” Those who don’t are easily overlooked.
The horror of the body of a tiny boy in a red parka washed ashore after fleeing Syria with other refugees in an unstable boat did not bring the current reaction in this country and in Europe. The still-happening repression in Syria by Assad’s brutal army — with Putin’s help — did not and does not bring anguish from the West. The borders here and in Western Europe are not wide open for support and comfort to the brown people fleeing the destruction of Syria.
And what of the Uyghurs in China? What of those fleeing murder and fighting in counties on the African continent, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia? What of people in Yemen, Myanmar and places shadowed from the world’s spotlight?
The borders in America and Western Europe have small entrances. The call for aid and offers of support to the people in those other countries are minuscule compared to the outpouring for Ukrainian people.
Within two weeks of the start of Putin’s war, the Vermont General Assembly passed and the governor signed $644,826 in aid (symbolically, $1 for every Vermont resident) to be given to a children’s aid group working in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian people need the support. So do the other populations in turmoil in many places on the globe — including the United States.
We react to Putin’s war from a humane and a strategic reality. If Ukraine falls under his control, other former Eastern Bloc countries are most likely in his sights. The stability of the West, if it can be called that, will become unstable. The prospect of all-out war, of World War III, is not idle thinking.
The images of Putin’s war in Ukraine are stark. The death and destruction are shocking. The implication of a conflict spiraling beyond that country’s borders is frightening.
Our response to Putin’s war is, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, one in which we do the right deed but that includes an insidious, wrong reason. We need to pause and look at who we are. We need to acknowledge our response includes our Achilles heel of racism in which reaction to the “other” is different from our support for those who look like “us.” We should not ignore that.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Ross Connelly: It is easy to come to the aid of people who look like ‘us’.
