Imagine that it’s 2014 again.
You’re a 53-year-old shitkicker living in Texas with the wife. You trim trees for a living.
On the other side of the world, your own government is overthrowing that of some country you’ve barely ever heard about.
I mean, yeah, again.
But this time the newly installed masters over there are honest-to-god fascists, and they are raining terror on their own supposed countrymen.
You happen to hear that in the far east of this country, a resistance is forming to the fascists in a pair of little backwaters called Lugansk and Donetsk.
What do you do?
Flip off that depressing shit and shift over to ESPN, right?
But if you’re Russell Bently, you instead sell everything, move across the globe, sign on with the resistance, and you stay eight years, and still counting.
It’s a little more wild a tale than even that, though, because Lugansk and Donetsk don’t even have what you’d strictly speaking call an army. Just a bunch of pissed-off citizens who don’t speak the same language as their new overlords, and want the jackboots off their turf. But the jackboots are not walking away. They’re staying put and killing your friends and neighbors. For eight years straight.
Get the interview with him from the Grayzone, because you sure as fuck won’t hear a story like this from your favorite millionaire cable spokesmodel.
In the meantime, if you want me to weep for the poor shivering denizens of Kyiv and Lviv, I’m going to do it. For you. For them. Without reservation.
Just kindly consider doing the same for the lady with one lone limb left to her by these bold freedom fighters you’ve been so cattleprodded to lionize and cheer on for days, when you see her face in the video.
If that’s too big an ask, just post a funny facebook meme about it, at least.
And if requesting that favor of you makes me a PutinPuppet or an enemy of ‘democracy’ in your eyes, well now.
I’ll just have to find some way to live with your scorn, won’t I?
“It is a sad thing not to have any friends. But it is much sadder still not to have any enemies.”
–Che Guevara, as quoted by Bently at the end of the interview.
I do want to say that I am unconditionally anti-war, and that the Russian oligarchs we hear so much about are no better than the American or Zimbabwean oligarchs that we somehow never hear about.
And, that I am not cattleprodding you to lionize Russell Bently, and in fact virulently disagree with his asides about ‘gender confusion’ and the “Canada-Mexico canal’.
Don’t lionize anybody.
Listen to your left. Listen to your right. Don’t trust anyone including me, Chris Hayes, and Megyn Kelly.
Trust your own best self and it’ll be right as rain, that pluvial substance renowned for variability in its rightness. The hard kind is gonna fall soon enough, erasing our disagreements and our pain as well as our joys and delight. Live free, and die either way, but smiling.
Any day now I’ll follow my own advice there sure.