When I am not meditating on my own demise, I’ve been attending closely to events that have been ongoing for 10 months to the day, starting with the February 24, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why this has seemed from the start so unthinkably offensive to me likely starts with my long preoccupation with how so many people seem indifferent to the fact that every single human life is a one-time unrepeatable thing. From the teenage thugs in Chicago who kill 12-year old girls in the flight path of bullets aimed at fellow teenage thugs to the mass killers of children in schools, worshippers in mosques, churches, and synagogues, and shoppers in supermarkets to the terrorists who get a rise from cutting men’s heads off to the cold-blooded drone attacks ordered and executed in America that make “collateral damage” of entire families in Afghanistan, and, finally, to a single man’s indiscriminate murder of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians—and treatment of his own soldiers like animals drawn to slaughter–human life has become as cheap as it was across Europe and East Asia in the war years of the 1930s and 40s.

But lives are never only taken by force of violence—they are whittled down at every moment to desperate and despairing straits by the lack of things that could make them whole, steady and strong enough to resist the pull of ignorance, narrow horizons, oppressive religious customs that turn men into bullies and women into slaves, patterns of cruelty that mis-shape entire generations born, bred, and dead in the same unregenerate places.

All this when it could so easily be different. As the visionary poet William Blake wrote in the face of the daily sufferings and deprivations visited upon the English working class at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in that most self-congratulatory Christian of nations:

Hard as it may be for middle and upper-middle class Americans to imagine contemporary America as a “land of poverty,” that’s exactly what it is for tens of millions of people who lack the wherewithal conferred by growing up in neighborhoods where it’s safe to walk day and night; where schools are funded to enable most, if not all, of their students to qualify for some form of higher education; where parents don’t have to scuffle between two badly-paid jobs and wonder how they are going to balance paying the rent with feeding their children;  where two-parent families are the rule, not the exception; where drugs and violence don’t take a disproportionate toll on parents and children alike. In the 200+ years since Blake authored his Songs of Innocence & Experience, apart from sustaining institutions like social security and Medicare in America and, in Britain, the National Health, not all that much has really changed for those who fail to make it into our middle classes. In fact, things are getting considerably worse, with the virus of ignorance circulating unchallenged among those who would benefit most from radical changes in our political and economic arrangements, and the virus of greed reigning dominant in those who have much more than they will ever require but who refuse to surrender a single penny to those in need.

This is hardly only America’s or Britain’s problem where at least a semblance of democratic governance is sustained. In a repeat performance of the demagoguery birthed in the 1920s and 30s in Europe and Japan, one-man or one-party rule has become more rule than exception in Russia, China, and India, the one the largest and the other two the most populated nations on earth; in theocracies like Iran and Afghanistan; and in increasingly authoritarian places like Egypt and Turkey. Once proudly independent states like Nigeria, Kenya, and post-apartheid South Africa are essentially run by a rotating array of thugs and predators, sealing off the astonishing wealth of their natural resources from serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of their people.

None of this is or should be news to anyone. But I find not a single instance in any of these countries (apart maybe from Iran) of serious, organized resistance to the authoritarian status quo, most notably in Russia where just over a hundred years ago a revolution shook the world, and where a tyrant behaving like Stalin’s second coming is draining the blood from his own citizen-subjects in broad daylight while laying waste to the ur-Russia he conflates with Ukraine. While Ukraine’s heroic resistance in the face of overwhelming odds models the courage and conviction that citizens in contemporary autocracies fail to show, it also stands virtually alone as a place where the value of individual lives is measured in terms of collective ideals—conditions that are sorely lacking in America, where the NRA has a choke-hold on mercenary office-holders who bow and scrape for perks and donations and mass murderers are free to wreak havoc with AR-15s.