Youkraine

This is not new. It is part of a long, glorious tradition dating back centuries. There’s never much of a point to understand a world event on its own. Far simpler and rewarding, is to try and shape it to fit your story. The same practice goes on at cafeterias and bus stations all over this great land. You know the move. In your jeans is a crumpled, crooked, creased dollar bill. The barrier between you and candy-coated bliss. You step on it, you practically iron it. You press it against the vending machine’s glass, weary of toppling it over in a final snack of Darwinian implications. Then you carefully place the flattened cash into the slot, hoping for a pause, indicating successful insertion.

But this mentality did not start with vending machines. From the eruption of Mount Mesuvius to the tragedy of Mine Eleven, the key to understanding anything is to put it in a simpler, personal context. That’s especially so when you’re only affected indirectly, from the glowing chyron and nothing else. Either way, indirectly is not non-directly. It’s something. Maybe you visited the place in question during a short spring break layover. You’re no authority, but the twenty minutes you spent in an airport cab are worth more than years toiling in the national archives.

When done well, it’s possible to carve out some excess sympathy for yourself. You’re just as much a victim as a real victim. Maybe more so, considering your follower count. Plenty of birds traffic in shameless dinosaur-sympathy as a means of destroying gutters with impunity. Are we really that much worse?