Re: Putin

Once again the world is forced to endure the playground bully who wields weapons of mass destruction and isn’t opposed to using them to fill his own egotistical needs.

Like the bully who beats you up just because he can, or doesn’t like the way you look, think, or worship, Russian President Putin has attacked people whose only desire is to maintain their independence. I am outraged by this and fail to find an effective means to express myself.

Historically, Putin has many precedents to draw on. I am doing research for a novel I’m writing featuring young Americans and their reactions to World War I. In The Guns of August, written by Pulitzer Prize Winner Barbara W. Tuchman, I find these words of German General von Bernhardi in 1910: “War, he stated, ‘is a biological necessity’; it is the carrying out among humankind of ‘the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.” There is more, of course, but by example of all the despots of history, this thinking is not uncommon and Putin certainly would agree with it.

And Americans are not exempt. We endured four years of similar bullying. Former President “Donald Trump has said that Vladimir Putin is “very savvy” and made a “genius” move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and moving Russian armed forces to them.”

Why must we continually have to contend with such people? When is enough, enough? Don’t these people understand that in a few years they will be as dead as those they kill today? Gaining all the territory, power, wealth in the world will be meaningless then.

By expressing my outrage, I feel I am “shouting down a rain barrel,” but I must do so, nonetheless. Maybe my thoughts and words can join those of like-minded people around the world and send a message to bullies that their fist is flesh as is my heart, and though they may stop my heart from beating, their fist will suffer the same fate; it will decay and be forced to relinquish anything in its grasp.