Monday musings 2
Omicron realities, China & Russia grand plans, mood on the ground in Ukraine & Russia.
Feels a bit like this Monday morning actually started on Saturday morning, with the first positive covid test in one of my children’s classes. The rest of the weekend was a blur of WhatsApp notifications, as the positive covid tests popped up, followed by official emails from school, and false alarms, and it wasn't until nearly 11pm on Sunday evening that we knew which of our kids would be going into school today and who would be home online. This morning was a mad rush to deliver youngest child to school to grab her books as soon as the classroom opened, and drive back across the city in time to be online for the start of the second hour.
We were exactly four minutes late, due to an emergency stop at a local bakery. I decided a fresh topfenbrioche bun was a necessary accompaniment to online school. My kid forgot her mask when she went in to the bakery holding only two €5 notes, and had to buy one for €1.20. Luckily she still had enough money left over.
Every little step of our lives is incrementally more stressful, and living with Omicron is proving to be what was quite predictable, namely, a lot of people sick at the same time until hopefully we hit the peak of this thing. Things are going to get a lot worse in the near term, next few weeks, before hopefully they calm down in the longer term, especially for families with children in schools and kindergartens. The virus is everywhere and it’s only a matter of time until we all get hit.
In the context of micro covid issues, I haven’t really been following Austrian political news play by play. I did enjoy listening to this podcast this weekend. The whole series is great, and this was an interesting look at who is Nehammer and how he differs from his predecessors.
I didn’t get to watch it live, nor do I have the stomach to replay it yet, but if you are interested in how Austria’s establishment is spinning the current Russia/Ukraine standoff, it was the topic of discussion on the terribly outdated weekly late Sunday evening discussion show, Im Zentrum. This basically sums up why I didn’t turn it on, or simply put, the real Russia problem that Austria does not discuss on TV.
What I did watch, and highly recommend that you do too, is this German documentary on the 80 year anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, during which a group of well-educated Nazis, average age 42, planned the Holocaust in a matter of 90 minutes over refreshments in a beautiful palace on a lake.
One of the most interesting things I read this weekend was in the FT, a look at Russia and China’s plans for a new world order, where they overlap, and where they differ. Little hint if you don’t have an FT subscription, open a new window and google the title, the article will pop up and you can read it without a password.
This section in particular really resonated with me (copyright FT etc)
At this moment, as the world holds its breath and pundits get overly excited sitting behind their fancy desks in their ergonomic desk chairs, thousands of miles from what would be the actual front lines, I think it’s so important to hear from people on the ground. Below are a section of firsthand accounts from Ukraine and Russia:
For context, both the U.S. emailed its citizens advising them to get out of Ukraine. The UK and U.S. are also both preemptively clearing out their Kyiv embassy staffs.
This report from near Voronezh (paywall, sorry) talks with local residents about what it’s like now that the Russian army has moved in. The tweet thread provides some color:
This is an interesting analysis backed up by polling data which tries to answer the question, do the Russians want war?
From Ukraine, some voices on Twitter sharing what life is really like in Ukraine right now.
This not young man in Kharkov speaks Russian with zero accent but says he will fight to the end to defend Ukraine (to put to rest all those ridiculous analyses solely based on native tongue!).
This below by Terrell Jermaine Starr is the most important point when you try to get your head around how Putin (and quite a few others in Russia, he isn’t alone in this) sees Ukraine. I was never able to articulate it so well.
I lived for almost a decade in Moscow, and although I have never been to Ukraine, I heard this talk often. It’s a form of casual racism, a feeling of superiority, more overtly shared by older generations but not held exclusively by them. Many Muscovites talked about Ukraine the same way coastal urban dwellers in America might talk about the midwest or the south. With snobbism, giggling about their accents, but it’s ok for a beach holiday or a weekend in Kiev. My feedback is old — from the period between 2000 and 2010 — and I am sure many young people do not feel this way at all, but the sentiment expressed below? I’ve heard it. It does explain a lot.
More from Kyiv:
Finally, this one was a gut-punch:
Meanwhile, if you look online, there are zillions of TikToks still circulating of Russian equipment and troops building up just over the Ukrainian border, in both Russia and Belarus. This video from Gomel, Belarus, for example.
I was also struck by this article; Israel is already preparing for the eventuality there might be an influx of people with Jewish heritage from Ukraine seeking asylum in Israel should war break out.
The potential for a wave of refuges flooding Europe is also something no one here in Central Europe seems to be taking seriously. At least not yet.
To end on a more upbeat note, I can recommend a book I am nearly through with, which doesn’t match any of the topics I normally write about, but I am really enjoying. Brown Girls is a new novel but really it’s more a collection of short essays on what it’s like growing up as the daughter of immigrants in Queens, New York. The descriptions are gorgeous, the author is young and such an astute observer, her take-downs of the privileged classes in America are unparalleled — a very refreshing read. You smell New York City on the pages.
Hope your Mondays go smoothly. Happy homeschooling and work from home to those of you also experiencing the joys of excess pressure on the wi-fi this week.