If I Don't Get This Out of Me - I'm Going to Break

This is going to be raw and personal. I'm not looking for empathy or sympathy. The problem is if I use traditional social media channels to share these thoughts, they will get taken down for my, ehem, "hateful speech." But I can't keep these words inside of me, so you'll have to forgive this moment.

This video explains everything you need to know about the War in Ukraine. Everything.

I have had thousands upon thousands of videos and pictures shared with me since February 24. Videos that show the absolute worst and the absolute best from humans.

This video is why Ukraine will win its war.

One thing that has struck me is the hundreds of videos and pictures, literally hundreds, that I've seen of Ukrainian soldiers showing kindness to animals. Cats, dogs, hedgehogs, gerbils (I did not know gerbils were native to Ukraine a year ago). Repeated acts of kindness. 

This video is why Ukraine will win its war.

I have to be careful to paint with a broad brush, I have seen videos of Russian soldiers with cats and dogs too, But I've seen other things - things that have broken me.

I've seen multiple pictures and videos of dogs with Z carved into their snouts or their bodies. I've seen dogs that were intentionally burned and tortured. I saw, and we shared, pictures of a field of cattle in Kherson killed simply because retreating Russians didn't want to leave anything for the Ukrainians.

I saw a pug smothered to death in a plastic bag simply because they could. Simply to make - a pug - suffer and brutalize their owner.

Whenever I see cruelty to humans, there is part of me that can - accept it - for lack of a better way to put it. We're a violent species. We're not the only species that have wars (monkeys do) or kill for the sake of killing (orcas do) or kill more than we can eat (ask any backyard chicken farmer what they think about raccoons), but violence against animals...

Animals that have been raised in loving environments trust humans. Heck, animals raised in a terrible environment can still trust humans. To use that trust to inflict pain simply because you can, it's just horrible.

I never told anyone about the pug, which I saw months ago, except my wife. And I wept. I sobbed. I was broken. I went as I did on April 1, 2022, after we concluded the first pictures out of Bucha sent to us asking for geolocation and verification were real. When my wife walked into my office at the worst possible moment and asked me, what was wrong, I look up and sobbed - they had killed everyone. And she asked me who. And I could barely spit out - the Russians. There are bodies in the streets. They executed whole families. We have pictures; it's more than one street. I collapsed into her and sobbed. I could not believe anyone could be that cruel. But this is Russian mir. This is the Russian way.

But not all Russians! This is ingrained in the culture, and silence is complicity. Dismissal is complicity. My wife told me stories about her childhood, how animals were treated, and how it broke her. How it was one of a long list of experiences that told her she needed to get out of Russia. That's the problem with authoritarianism and autocratic government. If you have a voice and means, you leave. If you have a voice and don't have means, you stay quiet, or you end up in prison, or worse. It is rare that those with means and a voice stay. Full disclosure, on the current path the United States is taking, my wife and I will leave, so call me the hypocrite I am. I'm in the "too old for this crap" camp.

This video broke me today because I'm just a flood of emotion right now. It is such a simple act of kindness. Owners were forced to flee; their pets were left behind. One combatant uses that for amusement. To main. To torture. To cause suffering. On the other side, you have - this. Here, let me give you my rations. Here, let me feed you. Hey, you can't jump into my car. What are you doing? Hey everyone, he wouldn't get out of the car, so meet my new battle buddy. I don't know who you are, human, but thank you for being kind to me.

Yesterday I had a story sent to me about how Russia is building a shelter for homeless animals in Mariupol. It looks like a nice facility. It was almost shared yesterday, but we saw it for what it was. There are tens of thousands essentially homeless in Mariupol. They stand in bread and porridge lines because there is no work. They have no heat. This isn't hyperbole and Ukrainian propaganda - we have Natasha of Russia and her fake humanitarian trip that showed us the "real" situation. Wonderful, you're building a shelter for homeless animals in a city that once was home to 440,000 people, now 90,000. You bombed it flat. You sent tens of thousands through concentration camps for filtration. An unknown number of people are in a modern gulag, deported to eastern Russia. If Russian occupiers had built this in Donetsk (city) or Luhansk (city), I could wrap my head around it. Not in a city that is a pit of suffering where Russian mir is on full display. This animal shelter is part of the Mariupol Comes to Life campaign, and I can see right through it.

I've lived long enough to have repeatedly seen karma balance the universe. Good eventually triumphs over evil, mostly. Sometimes it takes a very long time to get there.

Ukraine will win.

Thank you, I feel better.