DONA NOBIS PACEM 2022

 BLOG4PEACE - NO FREEDOM, NO PEACE

On New Year's Eve 1999 I was having dinner with friends back in Cardiff, Wales. When the clocks struck midnight, we took our glasses of champagne outside, clinked them, watched the spectacular fireworks our hosts had provided, then hugged and kissed and went indoors to drink a toast, proposed by my friend's husband:

"Here's to the new century and we drink this toast in the hope that you young people who are with us tonight will enjoy good things to come, without the kind of horrible events that your grandparents' and, to some extent, your parents' generations had to live through. It seems that you might be lucky."

There is always conflict somewhere and there were conflicts going on even as he spoke, but we all knew that he meant those words sincerely. Then 9/11 happened, less than two years later and the threat of terrorism was everywhere in our daily lives.

As if that were not enough, in 2020, all over the world, we found our peacetime freedoms limited in ways we could never have imagined because of the pandemic and here in Italy we suddenly found ourselves living under a curfew. Every one of us lived in fear of our lives and those of our families and, apart from following the rules, there seemed to be nothing we could do about it. Has this made us better placed to imagine how it feels to have your freedom restricted by war? Perhaps.

On 8th September this year Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died and on the day of her funeral the world witnessed the passing of an era. As a British person, I watched in sadness but also in awe at the splendour of the uniforms and the precision of my country's military. Yet a part of me was in despair for how, I asked myself, could there ever be a mentality of peace when we carry our revered dead monarchs on gun carriages to the sound of gun salutes and have woven the iconography of war into that of the nation? 

I am very aware that I am writing this one week before Remembrance Sunday in the UK, when the fallen and injured of all wars are commemorated, and I mean no disrespect. My own grandfather was blinded in World War I and I am profoundly grateful to him and to all who have fought for my freedom. I just wish there was another way of obtaining it, as, I am sure, do many soldiers. "No one abhors war more than someone who has been in one", my grandfather used to say. And it was that old warrior Sir Winston Churchill who said,

The one image of the war in Ukraine that I cannot get out of my mind is from the beginning of the conflict, when a young Russian soldier - a child, in fact, for he couldn't have been older than 19 - was captured in a village. The Ukrainian villagers were feeding him and being kind and even helped him to call his mother, at which point he began to cry. Is this what we want? Is this fair, that the old send the young into battle to try and resolve the messes that the former have made? Of course we do not want it and of course it is not fair. Where is the freedom for this young man and others like him to finish his education if he wishes, to have the joy of family, to live? No Freedom, No Peace.  

My thanks, as always, to the indefatigable Mimi Lenox, who inspires us all to blog for peace.

BLOG4PEACE - UKRAINE

 

This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter,

said President Obama following the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.

Although the President was referring to a very different situation from the one the world is trying to respond to today, these are words that have stayed with me, for any one of us, through a combination of geographical position and politics, could find ourselves caught up in a war and having to flee. We think it is so far away, and yet it is so near.

Yesterday I read some extracts from the diaries of Ukrainians in Mariupol, and I cannot get out of my mind the distress of a journalist who had finally pushed her beloved dog down the stairs and out of her building, presumably in the hope that the dog would find a way to survive. That could be any dog-owner too, in a sudden change of circumstances.

When Mimi Lenox, the indefatigable founder of Blog4Peace, decided to launch a special Ukraine edition of the project this weekend - we usually do it in November - I, like many bloggers around the world, wondered how I could do it, although I desperately wanted to. How could I put my hands on the keyboard and write about the tragedy in Ukraine when experts on that country and Russia also find their fingers paralysed by horror? But Mimi is right - this is exactly the moment when we must start typing, to show that words matter, that people matter, that peace matters to us all.

My first reaction to the escalating situation a few weeks ago was, "Have we learnt nothing?" but of course it is a myth that we have had continuous peace in Europe since 1945. Man just isn't that wise! And every time, I ask myself, over and over again, "Why?" Every time I see that leaders on both sides of a conflict have at least got themselves round a table, I want to yell, "Keep talking, keep talking! If you can declare a truce for an hour, you can declare a truce for a day, a week, a month, a year or forever. And if you can agree thus far, you can agree to stop it. So stop it!"

I do know it is not as simple as that and I have no idea how you can begin to reason with a tyrant. Yet I imagine that one man does have an idea and that, of course, is President Zelenskyy, for who can fail to admire this brave and inspiring man? Derided at the beginning as "just a comedian", he has defied all the odds. "Just a comedian?" No one is better placed to understand tragedy than someone who has an understanding of comedy, for the two are intrinsically linked. Even in Shakespeare's tragedies, there is often a fool or a clown and much comedy hinges upon a point at which tragedy is (only just) avoided; for example, girl almost marries the wrong man, then something happens that enables her to marry the right one and, to bring Shakespeare into things once more, "All's well that ends well."

Comedians, then, certainly have a role to play, as do the protests of ordinary people and an example of the latter has given me hope today: In the occupied town of Slavutych (Northern Ukraine) citizens continued to protest peacefully as sten grenades and bullets whizzed across the sky above them. They demanded a Russian withdrawal and the release of their imprisoned Mayor. In the end, they got both. Words matter, people matter and peace matters to all of us.

And tonight I will hug my dog a little tighter.