21 Things That Caught My Eye: Soviet Flashbacks, Surrogacy in Ukraine, & More

1.

2. Time: A Ukrainian Photographer Documents the Invasion of His Country 

Pacing the ward outside the child’s room, Dondyuk found the head physician and asked for permission to photograph the boy. “I told him that the Russian people need to see this,” Dondyuk recalls. “When we show them the children killed by Russian bombs, they will imagine their own children. Our children are the same. Our cities look the same. They will see themselves in us. They will feel it.” The doctors relented, and that night Dondyuk took a photo of the boy, whose name, reporters later learned, was Semyon. He was still in critical condition at the time. He died soon after.

3. Nonstop bombing, exploding buildings: Priest describes Mariupol attacks

4. AP News: ‘Why? Why? Why?’ Ukraine’s Mariupol descends into despair

There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.

They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.

“The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished,” raged worker Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck. “Damn them all, those people who started this!”

5.

6. George Weigel: Tyrants Like Putin Can’t Tolerate Truth

Both then and now, Soviet-style repression fails to silence sincerity.

7.

8. Francis X. Rocca: ‘Russian World’ Is the Civil Religion Behind Putin’s War

According to Kristina Stoeckl, a professor of sociology at the University of Innsbruck, the war undermines Mr. Putin’s campaign for traditional values, which had drawn the support and admiration of some conservative Christians in the West.

Or as Olivier Roy, a French political scientist, put it in a recent interview: “Putin sacrificed all the soft power he had acquired over the last 20 years, which allowed him to be a global player, for a purely territorial vision of Russian power.”

9.  Debra J. Saunders: Surrogate Babies of Ukraine Treated Like a Commodity

1o. Bari Weiss: Things Worth Fighting For

Zelensky knows what he is fighting for. “We are all at war,” he said in an address to Ukraine. “Everywhere people defend themselves, although they do not have weapons. But these are our people. They have courage. Dignity. And hence the ability to go out and say: I’m here, it’s mine, and I won’t give it away. My city. My community. My Ukraine.”

And he knows what he is willing to do to get it: In his speech last week to British Parliament he said it through the words of Churchill: “We will fight till the end, at sea, in the air. We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets.” He promised to “never surrender.”

My favorite Zelensky line of all though—the most profound thing of many profound things in these shocking weeks—came when a reporter asked him how he was doing given the circumstances. Here’s what he said: “My life today is wonderful. I believe that I am needed. That’s the most important sense of life, that you are needed, that you are not just an emptiness that breathes and walks and eats something.” 

…

Watching Zelensky and his people reminds me what we have lost. Of how uncertain and fragile we have become. 

11.

12. Checker E. Finn Jr.: Civic education and the battle for Ukraine

We’re all watching the news and hating what we’re seeing, the one big exception being the patriotic heroism of millions of Ukrainians (and the much smaller but still impressive collection of others who have been traveling to Ukraine to join the fight for freedom).

My granddaughter and I happened to be at the opera in Chicago the other evening, and before they started Tosca, they announced that the opera company contained a number of people with Ukrainian ties, whereupon the curtain opened and a mighty chorus sang the Ukrainian national anthem, the (English) words of which bear attention, including the attention of U.S. civics educators:

The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished

Luck will still smile on us brother-Ukrainians.

Our enemies will die, as the dew does in the sunshine,

and we, too, brothers, we’ll live happily in our land.

We’ll not spare either our souls or bodies to get freedom

and we’ll prove that we brothers are of Kozak kin.

Observe in that anthem the pride in country, the willingness to fight, the love of freedom, the unabashed patriotism—and pause to wonder why so many Americans in the education realm, including many K–12 and university educators, are squeamish about those heartfelt sentiments when it comes to their own land. It wasn’t just Trump and MAGA. This attitude arose long before.

While we cheer on the Ukrainians and do what we can to assist from far away (perhaps send money, perhaps urge our own government to do more), we might ask whether it’s also time for a reckoning in the education of young Americans, a reckoning that undoes the squeamishness about patriotism without succumbing to the craziness of jingoism.

13. Naomi Schaefer Riley: Children lost, then forgotten: NYC must swiftly complete investigations into the deaths of abused or neglected children

Do you remember Julissia Batties? What about Legacy Beauford? Or Jaycee Eubanks? It’s been more than six months since those children died in New York City at the hands of their own relatives, all having previously been reported to police or the Administration for Children’s Services for suspected abuse or neglect.

Yet astonishingly, we might not know for months or even years exactly how or why ACS failed these kids. 

14. ​​Sri Lanka: Cardinal wants clarity on suspicion of political collusion in Easter Sunday bombings

15. When parents’ rights trump children’s needs

16. David Sacks: A Social Credit System Arrives in Canada

When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them? Will Canadian financial institutions be forced to play Six Degrees of Deplorables? The fear of being ensnared in the dragnet will surely have a chilling effect on the commercial prospects of those suspected of “unacceptable views,” creating a caste of untouchables whom no one will dare to transact with or help. 

B.J. Dichter, one of the protest organizers who has had all of his bank accounts and credit cards frozen, expressed the sense of desperation: “It feels like being banished from the medieval village left to die.”

17. Rosemary Hopcroft: The More Things Change: Husband’s Income, Wife’s Income, and Number of Biological Children in the U.S.

18. Sister Dede Byrne gets a religious exemption from D.C. after mandate lawsuit

19. Mikhail Baryshnikov joins Pope’s appeal to stop the war in Ukraine

20.

21. New York Times Announces They Have Finally Confirmed The Watergate Tapes Are Authentic