Post 446 - March 4, 2022

Day 734…

Imagine if Canada invaded the United States.

What if instead of dying, the old crack-addicted mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford had become Prime Minister on a wave of populist voting. Suppressing his opposition, he started rigging elections so that nobody but him could win. As his power grew, so did his desire to expand. He decides that he, well Canada, needs more - more land, more resources, more of whatever, so he launches an invasion against his neighbor to the south to just take it. He lies to his people in Canada about what the United States is doing and shuts down social media to prevent those lies from being discovered.

He sends hundreds of thousands of troops over to the border near Niagara Falls and starts parading them around. He then crosses them over the bridge and advances on Rochester - shelling the city before he gets there. His aim is New York, Rochester is just the first step.

He takes Rochester. The Rochester Public Market is now a munitions dump. Frontier Field is now a military encampment. The Museum was shelled and half of it was destroyed. The animals in the zoo are dying because nobody is feeding them because the staff was forced to flee for their lives, taking only what they could carry.

As his convoys move towards New York, missiles start hitting the city. The Apthorpe apartment building that was used to film scenes from Heartburn takes a direct hit. So does the Bed, Bath and Beyond on 65th Street. New Yorkers either flee to the south or stay to fight. As the invaders get closer, Tony-winner LaChanze joins a group of counterinsurgents and learns how to shoot a machine gun. Celia Keenan-Bolger and Leslie Kritzer jump in with her and soon find themselves fighting against Canadian troops who aren’t even sure why they are there. They help fortify a position in midtown. Five guys and the dance captain from the cast and crew of Jersey Boys at New World Stages start training people how to shoot.

All over the city, people start moving down into the subways to avoid the ever-increasing shelling. The downtown track on 96th and Central Park West is a level deeper than the uptown track, so hundreds of people fight for a place to sleep on the platform and set up makeshift camps.

Our friends and families are now dying - killed in the fighting and in the explosions. A well-known costume designer, his assistant, and three stagehands lose their lives to sniper fire on 45th Street near Juniors.

Millions of Americans start fleeing the United States into Mexico to get away from the advancing army.

As fantastical as all that sounds, that is what is happening in Ukraine. I fear that all the pictures of Ukrainian nationals in traditional costumes are doing them a disservice. It makes them seem “other.” They aren’t other. They don’t dress that way unless there is a special occasion. They wear jeans and sneakers and t-shirts like the rest of the so-called “civilized” world. They are people living their lives the same as we are. They have comfortable middle-class existences. They have cars and washing machines and televisions. They have supermarkets and clothing stores with the latest fashions. Their kids go to school and come home hungry for a snack before they go out to play.

Since the end of World War II, the wars that the United States has been involved in have been in distant far away and exotic places like Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Even though we encounter people whose faces look like all the people in those places every day in New York City, when they are covered in dust and dirt, they look strange and “other” to us. Geographically, all those places are so far away from us that they might as well be on another planet. Like Sudan and Yemen, the average person could no more find these places on a world map than they could fly to the moon.

Ukraine shares a border with Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Moldova, and Belarus. It has a coastline on the Black Sea along with Bulgaria and Turkey. Ukraine is in Europe, not Asia. There have been plenty of major fights in Asia recently, but we have enjoyed seventy years of relative peace in Europe. Up until now.

We have been through it these last two years with the pandemic and the social upheavals. We are ready for it all to be done.

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 it took him a month to take it over. The Polish people resisted but they were eventually overwhelmed. France and England declared war on Germany right away, but we didn’t. We didn’t even start thinking about entering the war until Germany moved in on France and even then, it took us being directly attacked by the Japanese before we joined in. World War 1 had ended just twenty-five years before and nobody much had the stomach to wage another monumental fight.

We shouldn’t forget that the Russians have hacked into countless of our government agencies and major corporations here in the United States. Remember the recent discovery of all that? There hasn’t been much about that in the news lately, but that doesn’t mean that it’s just gone away. We don’t know what they did in there or what they still could do.

The time to stop Russian advancement is now. I’m not sure that we are going to do that. I don’t think that most of us want to do that.  I don’t think that any of us want to face up to what that might mean. For now, the Russians are comfortably over there, fighting against people in white-linen embroidered blouses.

Yesterday, as I was walking through Times Square there was a group of about 10 people holding Ukrainian flags and signs standing near the flight of red glass steps above the TKTS booth. Nobody was paying much attention to them. We shouldn’t panic, we definitely shouldn’t panic, but nor should we ignore what is going on in Europe with our Allies. We need to pay attention.

This seems like it’s maybe just another thing to keep us all from getting back to our lives the way we used to live them. We are just starting to see mask mandates being lifted. There seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Finally. Celebrate that. Celebrate the f--- out of it. We have earned the right to enjoy the fact that restrictions are being lifted. Enjoy it to the hilt, but let’s just keep an eye on what is going on over there and not tune it out completely. This is potentially as monumental as the global pandemic that we have all fought against so valiantly these past two years.

Ukrainians are our friends and allies and for some here, our families. They need our help badly. What’s happening over there is going to affect all of us, if in no other way, if we are lucky, then in our wallets. Politicians are already weaponizing our Administration’s response to use in the upcoming midterm elections.

I fear that this isn’t just going to go away. We are going to start hearing ever more about it and it is going to start taking up ever more of our bandwidth.

Breathe.