This HSP’s response to the ambush in The Oval Office
Disrespect is trading peace for profit, others’ lands for aggressor gains – and in the words of Nick Paton Walsh of CNN – “exhausted experience for moneyed ignorance”.
It’s exploiting a country’s vulnerability for economic gain, knowingly confusing peace with surrender and criticising a wartime leader for their clothes and not holding elections.
It’s failing to condemn three years of utter destruction of lives, homes, heritage and infrastructure; of untold damage to health and potential for generations to come; of war crimes.
It’s expecting a nation to give up things you’d never agree to yourself. It’s expecting the invaded to be grateful when you give their oppressors exactly what they want. It’s discussing your future without you.
It’s seeing an existential crisis as a business opportunity. It’s ambushing a leader you could never hope to be, with an attack dog in a suit. It’s talking about bullying behaviour as “making great television”.
It’s telling not listening. It’s not allowing someone – your invited guest – to respond. It’s choosing to ignore that peace isn’t just the absence of war but the absence of threat and the presence of justice.
It’s having a tantrum because someone has the audacity to not play ball or your game (of cards). It’s haranguing someone because you can’t control them. It’s having no integrity.
It’s having the cheek to lecture a leader whose life and those of his fellow Ukrainians is in daily peril when your view of events comes from sitting safely an ocean and a continent away from danger.
In the words of Theodore Roosevelt:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Of course no one wants more death and destruction. But let’s be clear: sovereignty is at stake. Ukraine’s today, others tomorrow, ours another day. And it will be the real dictators and their attack dogs who will be responsible for WWIII if it breaks out.
May our leaders have the courage and integrity to stand up to the bullies. For all our sakes.
