The world as we know it

    When this post goes up, it will have been one week since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. 

     So many people are talking about this, but the thing I keep coming back to is how so many were horrified by the invasion in Ukraine but said nothing when Syria was invaded. I am one of those people. 

    I stopped watching mainstream news in 2016. I realized that the only time I saw black people was on the news, and that every time I saw them they were being shot by police. Concluding that this was probably making me more racist, I decided to stop the watching the news. 

    I don't really know how to feel about Ukraine. I'll be honest, when news first broke that Putin had invaded Ukraine, my main thought was "Of Course". It had been building up to it for a few days, and with how badly things had been going for some time, it seemed like it was about time for warfare to break out. Honestly, everything since 2016 has all but ruined my ability to feel sad or angry about something. 

  But since then, I've been consumed with strange, conflicting emotions. I don't have any good words for what I feel about Putin. What he did was objectively horrible, and there will never be any justification for what he did. As far as I can tell, he invaded Ukraine because he thought he could get away with it. 

    But some part of me keeps thinking about the cold war, and wondering if Putin is invading Ukraine for the same reasons Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He wants to go back, to bring Russia back to the glory days of being one of the most feared nations on earth. It's a horrible thought, nobody else in the world wants this to happen, but he wants to be remembered, and he's hoping this will let him soar in his people's minds. 

    I look at Putin invading Ukraine, and think about how Donald Trump tried to stage a coup on January 6, 2021. Up until that moment, we'd been grudgingly tolerating him, certain that the mechanisms of democracy would protect us from the worst things he might try to do. But democracy didn't save us. Right now, western democracies are trying to use the mechanisms of the global economy to starve Russia into submission. What'll happen if they don't succeed? 

  All this is making me think of how we've been transitioning to a global economy. In theory, it's amazing. We don't have to worry about famine, we can get anything we could ever want, and we can go anywhere we please in an instant. But we moved to globalization without knowing what the outcome could be, and now we're seeing the costs that come with it. 

     But we can't go back. Even if we all wanted to turn our back on each other, we know that sharing what we have brings great rewards. That's why we built society to begin with. People want a freer, more globalized world. But if we want that, we have to abandon the old model of society. It's no longer a home for us, it's a prison all of us are trapped in, no matter how free we appear to be.