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Russia: it’s beyond the feeling of shame.
It’s a mix of hate, shame, disgrace, and cognitive dissonance.
Am I hateful? Absolutely.
That story about Brothers Karamazov being my favorite book, that mention of how my beloved Russian rock icon died in a car crash in the distant 1990, that occasional sense of pride of belonging to a nation with a supposedly rich cultural heritage.
All destroyed. I don’t care about any of this anymore. There’s only shame, all-consuming. There is disbelief.
And it’s not about Putin by the way. It’s not just about Russia’s terrorizing Ukraine today apparently revenging the Crimean bridge explosion (well, terrorizing Ukraine for a long time now).
It’s about the Russian people, the Russian nation.
I wrote this back in March:
Yesterday I was watching my daughter play tennis at a tournament in Southern California. A fellow tennis parent sat down next to me. He’s Russian. He runs a well-known restaurant business in Russia and travels to Moscow frequently, even now. He was in Moscow just a week ago.
“How is it?”, I asked him.
“Strashno”, he said.
