What a difference one month makes!

Thirty days ago, Russia was still on its own side of the border with Ukraine. The main attention-getter was the Canadian trucker’s convoy in Ottawa. C.O.V.I.D was still in the news but showing definite signs of fading.

Today, there is nothing at all about the convoy or its little sister in the USA (which hasn’t gained much traction or exposure), either in the news or in Washington, D.C. The relentless hysteria about the pandemic has suddenly disappeared and mandates are dropping like flies, including the “mask mandate” at Missoula County Public Schools although the outgoing superintendent, Rob Watson, thinks that individual schools in the district should be able to impose them without board approval–parents be damned!

Instead, the nearly unanimous focus of the news has suddenly shifted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In many countries around the world, especially in the West, Vladimir Putin has become arch-enemy #1, unseating the pandemic from its secure perch of the last two years by simply signing a document and nodding his head, giving the green light to his generals. (Anthony Fauci was abruptly displaced, left in the dust and rubble of his own making, and went into self-imposed exile, trying to figure out what happened and how to make a comeback which he attempted on March 15. Strategically, though, he also made plans for his future in case the comeback failed, which it apparently has. May the door hit you in the ass, Mr. Fauci, as you walk through it!)

If you are awake and alert, you would have noticed how seamlessly the narrative shifted direction, like a well-trained basketball team acting as one after an unexpected steal. It is almost as if the media suddenly became aware that the pandemic had worn out its welcome and a new threat to world peace, wealth, and well-being had arisen, personified by the New Hitler, Vlad Putin. Of course, remembering the incessant mantra, “Russia, Russia, Russia”, of the last six years, it is not difficult to understand why so many people could immediately pounce on the concept and start flogging it to death.  

The drums of war are beating loudly, in unison, across the world. Unlike the recently deceased “existential crisis” of the C.O.V.I.D. pandemic, the current fracas in Ukraine and the West’s response to it might prove to be truly fatal, considering how both the US and Russia have enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons in reserve, just waiting for someone to make the decision to pull the trigger, as Harry Truman did against Japan at the end of World War II.  Unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fallout from such a move could easily and irrevocably become the end of all civilization, not to mention life on Earth.

Thirty days is all it took to transition from a supposedly life-threatening crisis to one which is horribly real.

God help us all.