I realize that I've been neglecting this blog for the past month, indeed for
longer. It's the assault on Ukraine, of course, which appals with its brutality and, with each new report, with its sense that the happy illusion of an end of history was just that. Wars of aggression still happen. Civilians are still targeted. And the strong expect to get away with it, supported or condoned in their brutality by too many people for too many reasons. There's a related terror, too, that what the people of Ukraine are so bravely resisting will broaden in scope, that wider war will happen, that nuclear weapons will be used.
A visiting German friend put it this way:
Don't Americans realize that everything's changed?
My daily routines have not changed, though, with their little dramas and comedies, their frustrations and satisfactions, their discoveries and disappointments. Chronicling these for whatever sense of emerging or lasting significance a blog conveys just seems wrong. I'll try to persist, if only not to give into despair, the apathy that theologian Jürgen Moltmann says is the sin of the powerless...
