"...anyway, it's about old friends." ❤️

17/17 Бажаю всім у Новому році визволення, справедливості, миру та можливості бути повністю людьми-Желаю всем Нового года освобождения, справедливости, мира и возможности быть полностью людьми. ❤️❤️❤️❤️

16/x I miss & love my friends all very much & I fear every day for their & their families' safety. I hold them all in my hearts & wish for all a New Year of freedom, justice, peace, & the ability to be fully human...

15/x ...instead 2 things: 1) the unique qualities and experiences, always quirky, esoteric, surprising, that make them each an individual, distinct, special, beloved; & 2) deploying that individuality every day to be fully human & do all they could to make space for others to be.

14/x My Russian & Ukrainian friends all taught me that what was important about each of them wasn't whether their passport said "Russian" or "Ukrainian" or even "Jewish," wasn't which language they preferred to speak, wasn't where they were born, who their parents were, or where they lived but...

13/x ...To wind a center into the whirlwind, to make an order where previously there was none, to root humanity into the soil of that earth, so the earth may sustain human minds and bodies, instead of power operating meatgrinders to fertilize the physical earth with those minds & bodies...

12/x ......the numbers of people who we KNOW could know better but instead choose the whirlwind. Yeats wrote of that "widening gyre" that "the centre cannot hold." But Ukrainians and those who support them are engaged in a counterfactual experiment to Yeats' vision:

11/x In other words: nothing to defend and no one to defend it. No one to defend and no one to defend them/us. This permanent disorientation is consuming us here in the U.S.-we sink ever deeper into prolonged, all-consuming Soviet-style nonsense, the scariest & most befuddling aspect of which is...

10/x "Nothing is true and everything is possible" a fantastic book by Peter Pomerantsev & an apt description of a deliberate and central state policy: to ensure the population is always off balance, with nothing to hold on to, fall back on, no center as a point of orientation or departure...

9/x ...without facing physical or other punishment or destruction as a consequence. But we are now living through the Russification/Sovietization of this country: Soviet and post-Soviet power has always specialized in nonsense.

8/x ...Respect human life & dignity. Make room for all of us - especially our children - to have a safe, independent existence, where independence at its core simply means exercising autonomy over one's self & having means to act on structures that exercise power over us...

7/x ...Ukraine has evolved into a society that has decided - through protest, practice, poetry, and so many other pathways over the last 20 years in particular - that they are also determined to be human. That there are moral absolutes, most of which are very simple: do not hurt others...

6/x ...Ukraine, a country with a similarly complicated, often ugly (especially antisemitic - more Jews died there than any country during the Holocaust, including dozens of my family members) but certainly less imperialistic history than Russia's...

5/x ...human life has no value beyond the spoils it brings to the powerful. Being unable even to comprehend, let alone accept this foundational principle is a commonality my Russian friends (an appallingly small minority) have with the incredibly brave people of Ukraine, also including dear friends.

4/x The reason for this danger is simply that, post-USSR, these, my friends, were constitutionally incapable of accepting anything less than being fully human. The ugly, criminal, terroristic practices of Russia's regime are of an absolute piece with centuries of history in Russia and its empires:

3/x ...almost complete on Feb. 24, 2022. At that point, my friends who didn't leave the country altogether have disappeared virtually since that date. I'm writing this here, in this way, because I literally can't find some of them. I don't try too hard to do so for fear of exacerbating any risk...

2/x Many of these are friends I haven't seen in more than a decade, and not by either of our choice. With each year of New Years' phone calls, my Russian friends have spoken in broader and broader generalities, as the government has sucked more oxygen out of society until the suffocation became...