Just as fair warning, trauma is in the title, the entire world is engaged in seriously traumatic events right now and I'm going to talk about them and also try and put them in horribly traumatic personal terms to try and make sense of it. If you're not in a place to deal with that right now just stop reading.
I'm not in a place to deal with any of it, either. But writing at least gets the thoughts out of my head and onto a page or screen where they are a little less scary. But I'm still not going to feel better when it's done and as fair warning,you probably won't, either.
What is it like to see a tragedy taking place, have the power to stop it and yet feel forced to stand by and just watch?
You don't need me to tell you. You know. We all know. We stand in this moment where all the never agains and lessons from the past and wisdom about how you deal with bullies is confronted by the specter of nuclear annihilation. Every moral fiber of my being tells me that the world cannot stand by and LET Putin invade a peaceful, democratic nation. Every rational part of my being tells me that the world cannot risk direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. So where does that leave us?
If you're like me it leaves you in knots. There's this tense, tingly, twisted feeling right in my gut that hasn't gone away for two weeks. No amount of breathing or stretching or attempts at meditation have loosened it. It just sits there, twisting and turning. I'm angry. I'm afraid. I feel like a coward. I run the scenarios through my head over and over again.Move. Counter-move. Escalate. De-escalate. Our brains are remarkable machines for problem solving. But now matter how many times I run it through the machine it spits out a null set and I feel like one of those old sci-fi robots who explode after shouting “DOES NOT COMPUTE!” too many times.
And it all depends on the answer to one question—would he do it?
I don't think any of us know the answer to that question. Faced with a humiliating defeat in Ukraine, would Putin launch nuclear weapons against nuclear armed nations?
Part me of says no. He doesn't seem suicidal (and that is not even fair to people who ARE as I don’t know many who would take the whole world with them). You don't put yourself 30 feet away from someone to protect yourself from a 2% chance of dying of covid only to ensure the extinction of you and everyone else via nuclear holocaust, do you? And if that's the case he is just a bully making an idle threat. A threat he knows he can't carry out. So we are standing here watching thousands of people die (including his own Russian conscripts) and doing nothing.
No, not nothing. I know.
But it's like...it's like...I don't know what this is like.
The best I can come up with is having two neighbors. I'm watching one neighbor beat the living shit out of my other neighbor. The neighbor who is getting beaten up for no good reason keeps pleading with me to intervene. To help. But the one doing the beating has a live grenade between his teeth. Or he says that's what it is. If it IS and I hit him the grenade falls and all three of us die. So I just stand there. And I watch one neighbor bloody and bruise and beat down another neighbor. Blow after blow.Broken bone after broken bone. Maybe I toss my bloodied neighbor a bottle of water. Or even some brass knuckles to fight back. And holy shit is he fighting back. Keeps getting back up. But keeps getting knocked down again.
And I'm just standing there.
What kind of trauma would a person experience living through that? Yeah, it's definitely worse for the person being attacked directly. But I feel like all of us are going to wrestle with the trauma of non-intervention for a long time.
When rumors of a new Russian “offer” for peace floated around yesterday part of me just wanted them to take the deal. I selfishly just want this to be over. And I hated myself for it. For being afraid. For being a coward. I watch how Ukrainians are fighting and dying for their country. Their practically brand new democracy. And I am ashamed.
I don't have any words of wisdom or profound thoughts about how to deal with this. But I've been feeling these and so many other feelings over the past two weeks and figured I can't be the only one. Maybe you feel this way, too, and now you know you're not alone.