Roland Jutras: What’s happening in Ukraine is not a fair fight

To The Daily Sun,

Ukraine is taking a daily dose of what America saw for just one day on September 11, 2001. On the cusp of becoming the world’s number one orphan country, those who could help the most keep using "artful rhetoric" to make economic sanctions appear to be more important than military intervention.

If what happened in New York City on September 11, 2001 had taken place for 30 straight days, what would we have expected from friendly countries?

Ukraine’s mood may be best understood by recent verses by two of Ukraine’s most illustrious poets. Halyna Kruk: “We carry our dead like children, lay them out in the plaza and encircle them in the frost. The snow bewildered as if none of us yet knew it was so easy to die”. Ostap Slyvynsky:”So it goes, this empty language of love, bargaining with hope like a one-legged chair with a stove: let me be at least until midday. I won’t live through the night”.

Ukrainians are clinging to prayer and hope that brave people, outside their country, will show up and fight alongside them and see what evil truly is. Yes, that’s their hope, but what they're getting instead is hazy political reasoning and more artful rhetoric on why they can’t be helped.

I wish the Town of Franklin were a country and not a small vibrant community in the central part of our state. New Hampshire’s "Live Free or Die" license plate must mean something to the caring folks of Franklin. They recently rallied around 25 year old Jacob Doyle who mapped himself a plan to get to Ukraine via Poland. A son of Franklin, Doyle signed up as a "freedom fighter" and seeks to get to the Ukraine to help the helpless in any way he can. “If I can help someone else, I’m going to jump in,” said Doyle. He also stated: “even if I have to come back in a box, it’s something that I have to do”. “God Bless the community of Franklin for raising a young man like Jacob Doyle”.

What Americans are seeing on television daily is exactly what CBS’s newsreels were bringing to movie theaters all over America during World War II: sight of collapsed buildings, loss of life everywhere, bodies being heaved in trenches while wayward children walk in circles confused, suffering and in pain.

Ukrainians thought their freedom would be everlasting. Sadly, it won’t. It won’t because even a child will tell you that the Lion always devours the Lamb.

What’s happening in Ukraine is not a fair fight. It can be likened to a modern day Alamo.

Some countries have the military strength to stamp out evil wherever it exists. How they can just sit back and view satellite screens on the every day horror in Ukraine without a forceful push to right a wrong is baffling and incomprehensible.

Roland Jutras

Meredith