Today, like yesterday, the sky in this part of The Netherlands is a cloudless, pure blue. It is…cerulean. After weeks of high winds, grey skies and freezing rain, and after years of shared constraint — including, for many, great suffering and loss — there is the merest glimmer of the approach of spring (daffodils have bloomed in recent days on the canal banks) and our spirits are prompted to lift again, to think thoughts of new experiences, embracing friends and relatives, journeys and events to plan and attend. Simple but profound and necessary pleasures to contemplate. Finally there is a chance to think of something other than how our governments are, or are not, making life and the future for the rest of us more or less awful.
To the east of here, though, something different is happening.
For some people, hopes are begin crushed, plans made suddenly to seem like yesterday’s foolish dreams. Lives are being wiped away like so much dust and brute force is being asserted as if it were the only conceivable power of persuasion. This shouldn’t be news. It’s been happening around us for years now, decades. We’ve become inured to the sight of Syrian people, of Yemeni people, many others, bloodied and stunned, their ordinary peaceful lives as parents, accountants, shopkeepers, bus drivers, doctors and nurses, brought to ruin by a few individuals — men, mostly –wielding the power they so desperately need and hunger for.
We are all qualified now to chime in, to assert our opinions and give our assessments of the situation — its causes, its likely trajectory, and the best solution for all concerned; after all, we’ve spent more than fifteen minutes researching our social media feeds and a few uploads on YouTube. I do it (I’m doing it now). You do it. We all do it. We can all expound usefully on all the world’s problems. How democratic our world has become! Our voices are finally heard.
I hear Boris Johnson expounding a lot. He enjoys, I’m sure, the fizzy sensation it gives him of worldly importance — all puffed up and then out, with booming, robust words bouncing off the walls into eternity and the ‘history’ books he will no doubt write for the benefit of mankind.
But Johnson, and the various other often-cited craven little men that I need not catalogue here (but including Putin, of course) are the problem, not the solution. Bloated with ambition and testosterone, encouraged by political and electoral systems that reward their useful sociopathy, they view the world and the human societies we exist within as something to control and exploit, rather than the fragile, complex interdependencies that they actually are.
None of this is new, of course. Only, it’s becoming so exhausting. How much more greed, incompetence, violence and cruelty can we afford, can we endure? Yuval Harari recognises that human life, our survival is faced with existential crises – advancing rapidly toward us if not already here – that can only be ameliorated by effective joint action. At this moment in our history, when we urgently need such collaboration, we have world leaders who create and promote division either to bolster their undernourished egos or by such inaction and incompetence that it might as well be intentional. The well-intended ones paint pretty pictures with words, but there’s no follow through. They know our attention, as feeble as it is, reacts badly to nuance. Nowadays, when I see obvious courage and selflessness — in the Ukrainian people and Zelenskiy, for example — I am, (as I imagine, too, are all humans exhausted by the extent of malfeasance in political and public life) filled briefly with a hope I know instinctively is exaggerated by how little of it we have in our daily diet: the hope that we will live through these storms of reactionary violence and emerge as a human society that no longer vaunts sociopathic machismo as the ultimate virtue of our species. It’s the hope of daffodils and blue skies.
