The Maidan

Kyiv again. Again.

Interviewer: Why do you put the women in front?

Resistance fighter: Because the Russia aligned soldiers know that if they touch the Ukraine women, their boyfriends will beat the hell out of them. So it’s to get the Ukraine men to come out, to defend until death their women.

-from “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (2015),” Netflix

America doesn’t have a Maidan. Perhaps America should. America has the National Mall, today, home of temporary razor wire enclosures and lock downs. Shuttered buildings during Congressional Budget standoffs.

America does have paint — witness Black Lives Matter Street Square painting north and west of Lafayette Square and St. John’s Episcopal Church.

New York has Occupy Wall Street “park;” Minneapolis, the corner of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue; Selma, the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Washington?

Paint.

Maidan, November. 2016. Photo courtesy of publicradioeast.org.

America needs a Maidan, an amphitheater of angst. Angst is painted on walls, not on streets trucks drive across. In America angst is seldom seen hence rarely shared, as when there is a school or synagogue shooting. When innocent folk get in the way of a hate-coddled gun culture.

America knows that it has a weak President and a self-obsessed Congress that chooses corruption, that doesn’t understand sacrifice. In the days of Putin’s parading thuggery this is a toxic mix for the world to witness. Ukraine in this way is not so much about Putin, as Ukraine is about America’s lack of resolve.

America may have the info war advantage. But America lacks the signifier. America lacks the recent history of resistance that the Maidan signifies.

February 8