I never feel I have anything good to say, on days like this.
I’m watching Putin’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine, in horror, as I’m sure you are. At the moment I’m watching the shelling of Kyiv. I am thinking of the people hiding in the subway station, listening to those explosions, and praying for them.
I call this “Putin’s assault” deliberately, because the Russian people themselves don’t want this. They’ve been out in the streets chanting “no war” all across Russia today, and they have been arrested by the hundreds. This nightmare is the work of one cruel, selfish, narcissistic oligarch.
I’ve been racking my brain all day for anything I can possibly say that would be different from what people all of the world are saying, and coming up with nothing.
There were other things I was going to write about, before all hell broke loose. Happy things. This weekend was the fifty-fourth anniversary of the premier of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and I was going to write about my love for Mr. Rogers, my happy memories of watching it myself and of Rosie watching several episodes a day on Amazon Prime years ago when she was little. That would have been lighthearted fun.
Well, here’s something. This has been rattling around in my brain for days, because my head’s been full of Mr. Rogers and because it took place in Russia where people are being arrested for protesting Putin’s murderous actions today.
In 1987, when I was not yet three, I watched Mr. Rogers go to Moscow. And then I watched it again in re-runs several times, and again several times when Rosie was little. I practically have the episode memorized. Mr. Rogers flew to Russia so he could appear on a Russian children’s television show hosted by a lady named Tatiana. First he walked around the Red Square and tried to entertain some bemused Russian children with his Daniel Striped Tiger hand puppet, then he came to the studio and met Tatiana live on television. He invited her to come to America and see him.
The next episode, Tatiana did show up at Mr. Rogers’s television house, with an interpreter in tow. The three sat in Mr. Rogers’s powder blue retro kitchen, sipping juice out of awkward little paper cups. Mr. Rogers asked Tatiana if she had any children, and Tatiana showed the audience a photograph of her son, Dmitri. Dmitri was the same age as the target audience for Mr. Rogers. She kissed the picture like an icon and said, through her interpreter, that Dmitri liked toy cars, but his favorite thing to do was draw. She said that children in her country liked drawing and music, and they had little chairs and little beds just like children in America.
Mr. Rogers asked Tatiana if Russian children ever got scared of the dark, and she gravely said that they did.
That was his whole interview. He went all the way to a country with which we were embroiled in a cold war, in order to show us that the citizens of that country had children who liked puppets, and then he brought a woman from Russia to Pittsburgh to tell children that children overseas were scared of the dark.
And it’s always struck me that that is the most important thing you can know about other people who live in a different part of the world: those people have children, and those children fear the dark.
I am certain that the world would be a much better place, if our first thought when we think of other people, is that they have children just like ours who like cars and songs, who sit in little chairs and sleep in little beds, and who might be afraid of the dark. And that what we did to those people, we would also end up doing to their children.
I wish that I could reach across the world, and grab violent oligarchs by the collar, and scream in their faces that the people they abuse have children, who fear the dark. Even though I know it wouldn’t make any difference. But I can remind the rest of us about the children, and we can remind one another.
Yesterday morning, in Kyiv, children awoke to the sound of bombs when it was still dark. And they were afraid.
Tonight they are trying to sleep in the subway station, sheltering from more bombs, and they are afraid.
And I pray that whatever happens, we will keep the well-being of those children as their priority. And when the fighting goes elsewhere as it certainly will, we remember that those people also have children who fear the dark. And that whatever we do going forward, our minds will always be on the children.
May we always remember the children.
Image via Pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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