Appropriate Worry, Perhaps?

What I search for while in emotional distress as the world disintegrates

Recommended listen to do what you do when you want/need/BEG the universe to provide

With the advent of ubiquitous satellite radio, AM stations, the poor, mistreated, and forgotten early cousin of today’s options, continues to breath with the assistance of a ventilator powered by hamsters, and is essentially frozen in time. Not many harken to this type of nostalgia, unlike the Renaissance, or the Roarin’ 20’s, or even the 1990’s. The snippet penetrating my ears while driving home, my brain full of foggy paranoia from a full day in clinic, obsessively pushing the curved arrow on my three open browsers, pondering harder than Winnie the Pooh stuck in a hole, a hand width away from the honey pot, “did the pandemic REALLY hasten the mental illness of Putin that significantly?”

As clicking became more feverish, each breath never filling my lung capacity, a byline emerged onto the page: “Show This To Putin” - a picture manifested on my screen, a mother sobbing outside an ambulance medical heroes shared with her husband, and rapidly expiring ebony haired, mocha eyed daughter, wearing cartoon unicorns on her pants and coat.

Trigger warning, the actual article:

'Show this to Putin': A 6-year-old girl killed in Ukraine (cnn.com)

There were a series of images of the girl, my daughter’s age, undergoing life-saving medical practices I have undertaken on mannequins with zest, and on humans with the assistance of adrenaline & numbness as dread shredded any semblance of hope. Chest compressions are known to crack the sternum, and granted, in children, there is a different technique, but this is war. Regardless what war has provided modern medicine with, including many techniques and equipment and procedures that are now routinely used to save lives, this does not make them any less barbaric, especially when witnessed on children, victims of an unjust war.

I am a simple creature of habit, especially with how the radio is approached while driving. After getting through my twelve FM stations, attempting to jump the AM portion more quickly than Nick Cannon making babies, trying to get through my compulsory run-down of satellite stations, I heard chatter about Ukraine. The hesitation of my finger from the button was just long enough to hear an introduction of a monsignor from Kansas City who was an expert in “just war theory”.

He was eloquent and poised, an orator practiced in the art of persuasion. He is well learned, attending the Naval Academy, majoring in Physics, a Rhoades Scholar, and earned degrees from the same University my cousin earned her bachelor’s & master’s degrees in theology from, Mount St. Mary’s in Virginia, and appears to be well-versed in the history of war. His point of view regarding the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was the antithesis of a just war, but the pounding of my heart matched the cadence of a gazelle being chased by a cheetah as I processed the magnitude that there is such a thing as a “just war”. I uncharacteristically ceased my scrolling through the remainder of the eighteen programmed satellite channels on the overused, misused and abused 2010 Rav4 radio. Silence is scary when the brain and the heart are the closest to a potentially annihilating war than they have ever been, despite the number of times we were instructed to “duck and cover” under our desks in grade school. So cut-off in the dark void, I could not recall another car traveling on highway 100, during the 22-minute commute home at 5:08 pm.

Sitting at my computer at the end of the day, I habitually check my search history for my previous random meanderings into rat nests, worm holes, and rabbit warrens, which pique my creativity as my waking hours disappear.

Upon review, the searches were normal for any given day-in-the-life of me:  Why do we build up more ear wax as we get older?  How can I reduce my perimenopausal induced increase in breast size?  How to easily shrink hemorrhoids?  Why do bats hang upside down?

Where does the human tongue originate from?

Is it normal to fall asleep while sitting up?

And then I saw a picture of my 5 yo daughter on my inspiration wall. I blinked. The images of the cartoon unicorns on the young girl’s pants, exposed as she lay on a gurney, matching coat covering her lifeless torso, pierced my sometimes lifeless soul, shocked it into a regular rhythm. I was finally able to fill my lungs, but not my being. This war, the unjust war, is unwinnable from all sides. I often think about happenings as “is this the ending of the beginning or the beginning of the end?” Now, I feel what is occurring, entire families being killed in a “safe corridor” by mortar round, women giving birth to high-risk babies in basements of hollowed out buildings with inadequate medical support, an entire nation being invaded because a man with obvious mental illness has created a narrative which some on social media are saying is “another view”, is just the normal we have to learn to navigate and never stop battling, and this is not an ending. This is a beginning. A way of thinking that if around in the 1940’s would mean we would be a world with no Jewish people, no people with perceived inferiorities, no people who did not look, act, think, believe as the Nazis did.

A world I would not be allowed to live in, nor my wife, nor my child.

And now, one less little girl who obviously loved unicorns and whose parents obviously loved her, is lost.

My eternal pragmatic nature is devolving into pessimism.

I need chest compressions of rays of hope that my daughter WILL have a world to inhabit. I need

I need a ventilator that perfuses my lungs with belief that Russia does love their children.

I need an IV drip of peace, even as little as a 500 mL bag, which may help me stand up tall, be fierce in my words, powerful in my actions, and true in my nature, until I quit ducking and covering.