Free Ukraine

There are obviously many problems with war, most noticeably the loss of lives, especially the "collateral damage" of civilian deaths.  But with his invasion today of the Ukraine - and yes, it was an "invasion" - Putin may have triggered a chain of events that are difficult to predict, with consequences even more unpredictable.

Will a refugee exodus of Ukrainians into Western Europe further inflame the anti-immigrant right in countries like Hungary, France and England?  And what will that in turn trigger?  How will the chaos of war and the sanctions placed against Russia by the U.S. affect inflation, supply chain problem, and the already stressed economy?  What other important issues will get ignored while this conflict sucks all the oxygen out of the conversation?  Will the fighting spill over to the NATO-member Baltic countries and bring Russian and American troops into direct conflict?  Will all of this eventually go literally nuclear?

My formative childhood years were in the 1960s with their "duck and cover" nuclear war drills in school, watching neighbors dig fallout shelters for their families in their backyards, and the grim realization that if the bombs did start falling, there was no room in their shelters for me.  "If anyone dies whilst in the shelter," we were told by the PSAs, "be sure to put identification tags on their bodies first before putting them outside for identification purposes later." Grim stuff for a 10-year-old.  

Most of my life, I was fairly convinced that I was going to die, like most of the human race, in the inevitable global nuclear war.  It was a remarkable sight in 1989, then, when I watched German protesters take sledge hammers to the Berlin War, signaling the end of the Cold War.  Maybe I wasn't going to burn to death by thermonuclear annihilation after all.  The 90s were a great decade of apparent stability, not without problems to be sure, but the end of the world wasn't among them.  Things began to unravel again following 9/11, and here we are once again considering nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Rooskies, as Major T. J. "King" Kong put it in the movie Dr. Strangelove.