Wars and rumors of wars

February 24, 2022

Troops crossing borders of a European democracy? Before dawn broke in Moscow this morning, Russia's boss declared his invasion. I'm trying to understand how we got here. 

Yes, I know: intra- and interstate violence is common enough among humans. Plus our press and pundits still privilege the travails of places like Europe while too often ignoring the global south. 

But there's another reason why Ukraine weighs heavily on my mind. 

The year 1989. In June of that year, Tiananmen's tank man slipped into my high-school graduation speech. (So did Dennis Miller, but that's another story.)

Throughout my first college semester, the Cold War progressively crumbled. The Berlin Wall came down in November. By the end of December, the dissident Václav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia.

Unimaginable, shocking, and giddily hopeful. The peaceful triumph of democracy seemed so inevitable that some claimed history itself had ended.

I bought a poster with scenes from 1989 revolutions for my dorm-room wall.

And now my younger child prepares to start their own college journey, as do the thousand admitted students we met last night at eXperience Cincinnati downtown.

Fear and foreboding, the fragility of democracy -- of our own democracy: these provide the geopolitical backdrop to their college experience. Hardly the stuff of posters.

All the more, we must find ways to accompany them to create a hope-filled future. Last night, I needed to borrow some of that hope from them.

And I prayed for peace.

photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0