172. One minute on the War

It’s true that more people die in plagues, pandemics, and the swarms of infectious diseases that swell and whither in their own times and places around the world than die in wars. A third of Europe died in the plague; fifty to ninety percent in indigenous American tribes fell to smallpox, measles, and other European diseases in the first years of colonization; and an estimated fifty million died world-wide in the 1917-18-19 Influenza epidemic. We’re now at eight million Covid deaths world-wide, and are approaching a million in the US alone. 

But Ukraine is heart-stopping. 

 

Diseases are car accidents and Ukraine is an airplane crash. More of us die in car accidents than in plane crashes, but we have levels of control on the highway that we, as passengers, don’t have on planes. With diseases, we vaccinate, mask, drink clean water and take care of ourselves—or we don’t. Our Covid Pandemic, a stealth invader, works its way through the crowds, picking off one and leaving the next. Most—though not all—of us who take precautions live on. 

 

In the War in Ukraine, personal choices—to flee or to stay, to go to this bomb shelter or that one—are small compared to the power and randomness of Russian artillery and bombs. War in Ukraine is, as one still surviving told a reporter yesterday, a daily lottery for its citizens.

 

Doctors and politicians differ, sometimes mightily, on dealing with the Pandemic, but they drive the buses and we are citizen passengers, mostly listening to their advice, sometimes screaming at them to make the other turn. Or we drive our own cars and disregard the warnings of experienced drivers completely. It might be an at times contentious world, but it is largely predictable.  

 

To stay with my analogy, Putin is the aggrieved pilot of a huge plane loaded with deadly weapons. He also has a yen for ancient glory. And looking at the pictures of Meriupol, the destroyed hospitals and refugee-filled theater, the blocks that were once apartment houses, and remembering the jihadist preparations before and the lottery-like outcomes after 9/11, I fear that his deadly combination of aggrievement and hubris will result in Putin flying his plane into a deadly explosion that will engulf us all.

 

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