I’m not really sure where to start with this month’s ‘Is It Me?’.
As you know, my main objective with this blog is to take a light-hearted look at something which has either garnered my interest or annoyed me and gently poke fun at it. I’ve tackled most things, including bad drivers, violence on TV, littering, office attire, sports, beards and baldness, literature and of course Crocs. The views are always my own and I don’t apologise for them…especially my views on Crocs.
This month, however, I’m finding the column a little difficult to write. I honestly haven’t got it in me to write something mildly amusing when such a devastating war has broken out in Europe.
I suspect, like many, you have been watching the scenes in Ukraine unfold live on television with an equal measure of disbelief and horror. I can’t quite believe it’s happening and the pictures coming in of buildings laid to rubble, children hiding underground with no food, families being torn apart, and thousands of innocent and terrified people being displaced and killed is heartbreaking. I keep coming back to that awful word, ‘displaced’. It makes me feel numb.
I’ve been looking at my own family, my own children, and I just can’t imagine the misery and confusion that so many people are going through, even as I type this. A couple of weeks ago children in Ukraine were going to school, ordinary folk were going to work, families were gathering, eating together and sharing their normal day-to-day lives. How can something like this happen?
Geopolitics, ideology, propaganda, money, borders, suspicion, tactics, economics, false flagging. It’s all there and on a macro level and I understand why our various leaders are so focused on these things, but the human cost makes for unbearable watching.
To the people of Ukraine, I am so sorry that this is happening to you, your families and your country. I, like so many others, can only hope and pray that a peaceful solution is found soon. The devastation caused is going to take years, generations even, to put right physically, but I suspect the hurt and trauma of what has happened may take longer to heal.
Times like this certainly make you think, don’t they? Yesterday’s minor complaints and irritations seem irrelevant when you know so much suffering is going on. For those of us lucky enough to be here, safe, warm and stable – well, I guess we should count our blessings.
