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So, if another country bombed your city's infrastructure into dust, killed thousands of your neighbors and forced the majority of women, children and the elderly to flee to neighboring countries and men to join the military, how would you vote on whether your city should become part of that country?
You'd vote no, I suppose. I think I would. Life was presumably better before your home was destroyed and your neighbors were killed.
I see, 98% in favor. Good job, Putin. It seems you were right and everyone else was wrong.
All this brings up these age-old discussions about what constitutes civilization. What is land ownership? What constitutes a valid claim to land? It is just dirt and stuff we put on it, after all. When I was younger, there was a country called Yugoslavia. Last I checked, there were seven independent countries within those borders, and I'm not sure they're done dividing yet. It seems just a matter of time before China re-colonizes vast parts of Africa. Even the "great experiment" of the USA has a non-zero chance of balkanization (Yugoslavia's demise was so notable, it inspired its own word) as political views have become the most important division on dating sites - more important than sexual orientation these days, according to some story I read recently that claimed polling had been done, though that could have been exaggeration.
This isn't written to justify Putin's attack. Obviously, this has become some sort of proxy war between Russia/China and the West. The stakes are far greater than the ownership of a relatively small amount of dirt. So we continue. For us, just another large number added to an inconceivable national debt. We can't repay it, eventually what we call inflation will absorb it, and we hope, like after the '70s, that Washington starts thinking about the economy again before it's too late. For Russia, a testament to life in a country where the government always knows best and the media is simply another branch of the government.
But for those whose lives were directly affected, nothing can make up for this. World War I was once called "The War to End All War" because it was hypothesized that so many people had been directly affected that the world, collectively, would finally understand that fighting over who administers dirt has too great a price - all the dirt is assigned (at that time, Moon exploration wasn't even a science fiction topic). But World War II started barely 20 years after World War I ended. And we learned that if your leaders are safe inside a guarded building thousands of miles away, they quickly forget what war really means.
Oh, well. Maybe someday we can choose our country the same way we can choose what brand of clothes to purchase. We just fill out a form online, click send, and a package of laws and a bill for taxes arrives in an Amazon box the next day. No need to peek at the little man behind the curtain.
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