The Grinding of War, continued

As the war in Ukraine keeps on going long after I'd expected it to end, and more and more grueling stories come out, I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to be dispirited in general. One or two days I just refused to read any war news. Today I nudged myself to go and donate again (this time back at the Berlin main train station, where hygiene articles and baby food have been especially wanted lately). But especially because there are fewer donations in general — one Berlin organization has reported receiving about 1/3rd as many donations as 2 or 3 weeks ago — it feels more and more like a small drop in the bucket.

Along the way I passed the Holocaust memorial near Brandenburg Gate. The heavy feeling of not doing enough became a bit weaker, as I reflected whatever one does to help people who are at the mercy of some overpowering force, whether war or their own government, is at least a step in the right direction.

What makes donating things that one can buy in a grocery store (or drug store) a bit more awkward is that there has been a trend to hoard food in Berlin, to guard against rising prices due to fuel scarcity and dwindling Ukrainian and Russian agricultural exports. I've become increasingly uncomfortable about buying large quantities of things in stores for fear of depressing cashiers etc. with apparent greed, and of course feeling embarrassed.

Berlin's main train station, glowing in the dusk, was not as busy as at the beginning of the refugee ingress from Ukraine. The white welcome tent definitely had people in it, blue-vested volunteers, and security personnel guarding the entrance in a friendly way; but the blue and yellow flag signs had largely disappeared. Picnic tables were set up in the large hall where food (and hygiene supplies) were made available, and there was less apparent hurry and more of a willingness to settle in for a while, eat and reflect, amongst the people who were there. A friendly English-speaking volunteer accepted the little hoard of shampoo, shower gel and deodorant that I'd brought, based on a request list online.

***

I have a few people management challenges at work, and I'm fairly anxious on behalf of a few colleagues. A higher-up colleague will also be visiting from the States.

At lunchtime I've been playing piano more often: Scarlatti sonatas, a bit of Albéniz and other more modern composers, and passages from Bach's Art of Fugue, which I'm still sight-reading slowly from cover to cover and is less emotionally dry than I thought it would be. My recent theory that being overworked and miserable gives one exactly the right frame of mind to interpret Bach's music better, continues to be confirmed. It's a little relaxing.

In the evenings, the muezzin has regularly been calling to mark the breaking of the fast for Ramadan. The restaurant tables on the sidewalk underneath the apartment are packed at dusk. It always feels nice to know that people are enjoying themselves again in a way they couldn't for a year or two, since Covid-19 began spreading in Europe. So that's also relaxing.

I've been trying to finish listening to the Jimmy Carter biography audiobook (taking a bit of solace from the fact that world politics were crummy then too, but intermittently improve), have read all of Delphine Minoui's journalism memoir I'm Writing You From Tehran, and I'm now in the middle of Bonnie Tsui's delightful non-fiction book Why We Swim.

And I'm also trying to break into 'citizen journalism' again in my spare time. The Ukraine war keeps hitting me over the head with the realization, 'There are really important things you could be occupying yourself with right now.'

Right now it's easy to find story ideas, and to be a bit frustrated that professional journalists apparently aren't picking up on the obvious.

I wanted to research past oil crises in the 1970s, and which lessons they can offer for today.

I also wanted to research European energy independence. But I realized that I don't know the first thing about the science of household energy or about the policy of energy independence: one or two Foreign Affairs articles already left me in the dust with two terms I'd never heard about: blue hydrogen and green hydrogen. It is easy to inadvertently write something so terribly wrong that it is like drawing a Mickey Mouse cartoon to illustrate a serious mouse biology research paper.

So I turned back to doing the readings (in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, various books and articles by Samuel Huntington and Fareed Zakaria etc.) for an old MIT course about democratization, so I have a better grounding in political science. I've reached week 4, and the readings offer Singapore as an example of a reasonably functional government that is only semi-democratic. I hadn't thought of it in that light before and am fine exploring it. But I would also question in Eurocentric, armchair critic fashion how transferable its model is to any other context (e.g. countries of more than 4 million inhabitants, countries less in thrall perhaps to modern remnants of the British colonial worldview).

Besides I'm progressing in taking Ukrainian lessons via Duolingo.

But underneath it all I'm really desperate for the long Easter weekend to arrive.