Ukraine and Russia Are Trading War Crimes
Supposedly Christian Nations Committing Crimes Against Humanity…that’s depressing.
Thesis: There is no hope for our generation. We grew up crooked and will die crooked. But for our great grandchildren and beyond, there is at least a greater than zero chance they may find true hope in the world. But for now, you and I are mired in Dukkha, and there is no salvation.
Dukkha — often oversimplified as “suffering” — is best understood as “unsatisfactoriness". The hub at the center of our wheel is lopsided, so our entire journey in life is bumpy at best (and horribly shitty at worst). Dukkha is not a pessimistic value judgment on life, it’s a structural diagnosis. In Buddhism it’s Dukkha. In Science it’s the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
So we’re not getting out of it and there’s no hope.
But of course, humans can’t live without hope. So I’ve adopted Karuna as my way to make sense of the world, give each day some meaning, and give my overall life a little bit of hope.
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Karuna is compassion in action. It is not pity. It is not sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, or someone else, or the world as a whole. It is seeing pain and moving to fix it. When you feel Karuna, somebody else’s trouble becomes your work. It starts with empathy, but it ends with doing something. You see the suffering, you feel the weight, and you act to lift it.
How do Dukkha and Karuna relate to Ukraine and Russia? Because it’s so discouraging, what is happening now. I’ve started Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (though it’s hard to read because the atrocities are so horrible and awful).
Snyder reports that, between 1933 and 1945, 14 million civilians were killed in the same general region as the fighting going on now. It’s a space 2.5 times larger than Texas. These 14 million specifically exclude military KIA.
In the Ukraine-Russia war, there hasn’t been 14 million civilians killed. But didn’t you hope humanity might have learned it’s lessons after World War 2?
That’s the real crux. I truly believed, all these years, in “progress.” Today’s world leaves those beliefs in tatters.
Conclusion: Humanity has NOT learned the lessons of World War 2. But you yourself can adopt Karuna (or something similar) as your way to slog it through these difficult days until we finally die.
