Hey Mike! Where ya been? What’s new? How’s tricks? We worry, you know, when you go dark…
Cindy Taylor
Hi Cindy
All is well with me. I’ve been traveling a lot, and tried to post several times last week. Once to share a joke, once to remind people about our work ethic scholarship program, once to share a link to my most recent podcast, and once to announce a new season of Dirty Jobs. But every time I started to type, I thought about that woman from Mariupol. I don’t know her name, but she got pretty famous last week for trying to give birth when a bomb, or maybe it was a missile, crashed into the maternity ward where she was laboring. I last saw her lying on a stretcher, covered in blood, above an article that explained her pelvis had been “crushed and her hip detached.”
As Kevin Williamson observes in the article below, “I don’t even know what that last part means. I suppose I can imagine a crushed pelvis easily enough. But I can’t imagine what a detached hip looks like or feels like.”
The woman is dead now, and so is her baby, and this has made it difficult for me to discuss the various things I typically share on social media about my incredibly fortunate existence. That’s the problem with having a Facebook page with lots of people on it. You can’t comment on stories like this without depressing lots of people who are looking for something to smile about – a respite from all the trouble in the world. But you can’t ignore stories like these, because…well, because you’re a human being, and they make you angry. And because doing so would make you appear detached from the real world. Detached, like the hip of a woman whose name you don’t know, whose face you can’t stop seeing, whose terrible death was made possible by a murderous coward who seems determined to destroy not just Ukraine, but his own country, too.
Most of what I sat down to write today, is better said by Kevin Williamson. So, I’m sharing his words here. Fair warning, it’s neither light nor breezy. I’ll be back later, with something less depressing, but far less important.
In the meantime, Cindy, what do think we should do?