Sunday night May 29, CNN aired a one hour documentary “A Mother’s Diary of War” at 8 PM EDT as an episode of Anderson Cooper’s AC360 program.
CNN is not very good about having fixed-URL stories about upcoming or past episodes, so here is one on the Global Herald.
A young mother named Olena, with a newborn and two other kids, starts videos two days before the Russians invade, when all is calm. Then Anderson visits her several times, as she recovers somewhat from the partial damage in Kyiv, which gets better when the Russians are forced to retreat to the East. The kids can even play outside again.
The coverage of the mom’s life is punctuated by coverage of other horrors, especially Mariupol.
Her husband, who had no previous military training, was conscripted to fight and she hears from him occasionally.
Zelenskyy, as an actor and content creator whom I might have personally befriended in peace (and he had appeared in a Ukrainian series called Servant of the People) was very emphatic at the outset about conscription, requiring all able-bodied men 18-60 to remain and fight, and many of them have been wounded or killed – sacrifice. This sort of invasion which treats civilians as enemy conscripts (and leads to war crimes and often violates the Geneva Convention) used to be the stuff of history, when one ruler wanted the natural resources of another; now it could be construed as zero-sum-game "strategy" in a world facing climate change.
One of the points I stressed in my three DADT books was the idea that many societies (historically) believe they must depend on men to protect women and children and make themselves fungible in the process. That’s an idea George Gilder had discussed in his 1986 book 'Men and Marriage'. That, I said in my books, was one reason why the original military ban on gays could reinforce discrimination against them in other areas. What is happening is forced on the people by external events. Olena’s little boy asks 'Mom, why do we now have to go to war?' and she answers 'Because the enemy came to our land and they had a bad president.' Necessity undercuts liberal desires in the area of gender identity and sexuality, sometimes. I haven't heard what happens with trans persons in Ukraine (in the United States, those born as male have to register for Selective Service – and the gay lobby never mentions this). But I also haven't heard about COVID, or whether refugees, when they arrive in Poland or other countries, are being vaccinated before they are housed by 'strangers' (to borrow Max Reisinger's use of the word). In Poland, in fact, practically all refugees are being housed in homes of families or persons, not in dorms; this seems expected of Polish citizens, who see this as 1939 again.
.As a bonus, I just want to share a math video today, March 31, 2022 by Andrew’s Campfire, Möbius Strip and Klein Bottle: A MIND-BLOWING Paradox Unlike Any You've Seen Before.
There is an interesting paradigm for overcoming the Grandfather's paradox with time travel using a Mobius strip, which sort of comports with quantum theory and maybe metaverses. Maybe this translates up to higher dimensions with the Klein Bottle. But that sort of begs the dangerous notion that you can just undo a previous wrong. Remember that line in Gone with the Wind where Rhett tells Scarlet that saying "I'm sorry" sometimes doesn't cut it (and that's not the last line of the movie).
(Posted: Monday, May 30, 2022 [Memorial Day Holiday in the U.S.] by John W. Boushka)