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No number of wrongs make it right

March 24, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Picture this: a huge number of people are forming a circle around an incident. In the middle of the circle, acutely aware of the spectators but determined to continue with what they are doing, several men are beating an individual. One of the men is shouting at the victim, using foul words and accusations. Every so often he turns to the crowd and warns them- “if any of you dares to try and stop this – try to call the cops – tries anything! We will beat you too, drag you in here and thrash you and anyone who is with you – your wife, kids – your mother – drag them into the middle here and give them the same treatment we’re giving this guy.”

There are other men wandering around outside the crowd, telling random people about the man being beaten – how he was a traitor to his gang, betrayed their confidence – told lies about them. They said he had tried to break up valued friendships; had attempted to lure people away from the gang and form his own gang.

Did people want another gang war? No! Of course they didn’t!

No one tried to chase the spectators away as though they wanted witnesses, as they were sure the witnesses would never speak against them – never appear in a court to identify who they were that were beating the man in the middle. It seemed they were right for the crowd stayed, horrified but mesmerized at the brutality of the beating which went on for a long time without actually killing the man. It seemed his abusers wanted him to survive in a wheel chair, to live in pain and disability as a warning to any other man guilty of his intentions and alleged betrayal.

No one in the crowd moved; they promised themselves never to deal with this gang again; they swore they would always think badly of them but what could they do!? The gang would turn on them and their families and homes and the people they knew who weren’t even there watching….

Be honest now, this is not the first time such a picture has been the fact. Name it when – less than every 50 years on this planet since the introduction of us when such a scene was not the case somewhere. Those bullies are revered as explorers and heroes or reviled as maniacal despots overrunning independent victims without a vestige of truth in their reasons for invasion.

They were heroes or despots only depending on who was writing the history.

Perhaps never before though, have the “crowd” been so ham-strung as they are in this very moment of history. If we survive to write history books about this time, I very much wonder – and so do all of you, admit it – how the story will pan out. 

Science fiction authors have written books, movies have been created – so much fiction has been given over to an imagined post- apocalyptic future. For that matter, I have written such a story.

Much as you and I sincerely wish, hope and pray such a future will never be the case, the truth is we can’t go on as we are – crazily in a rush to destroy our own nest, insanely vicious, greedy beyond logic and timorously in denial. 

How is insanity defined? I have read in analytical columns written by wise and well informed journalists that Putin is not insane. He is cruel, cool and calculating but not insane.

That assertion gets a “wow” from me. That a single person with the power to do so may send his troops into a non-aggressive country, citing reasons which do not exist and pound on primarily civilian targets, destroying whole cities without actually freeing any claimed victims – only making victims of people who had lives and homes and employment, taking all that they have away from them – for that person to be considered sane is as insane as I can understand.

Oh but wait a moment. I am not saying Putin is alone in this historical context. Why, only 70-80 years ago, Hitler was pounding on Poland, The Netherlands, France. Before and emphatically after him, there were similar atrocities – well just check the long, long list. 

Here’s the rub. Hitler was the last despot we could confront the way we did– and by the bye, we let him do a lot of damage before we did anything.

Putin is the first despot to pull this act knowing nations will not “declare war” on Russia. The guarantee of that apocalypse of a nuclear war stops the watching crowd in its tracks.

Yet and yet. Somehow, very, very soon, he must be stopped.

How powerful is the internet? Can a flood of objectives proof hacking into Russians’ limited social media, interfering with the news feed overwhelm and destroy Putin’s propaganda so that the Russian people themselves rise up en masse to stop the slaughter? 

That would be irony at its finest.

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