The situation in Ukraine is only into its second full day and this happens to be the first war that we are not only watching in real time, but form the perspective of people watching this happen on their own streets.
This isn’t a war correspondent embedded with coalition forces being protected, to a degree, and seeing what the unit they are tagged in with is seeing. These are videos from citizens and soldiers on the ground, on both sides in in many cases, who are still accessing the internet and uploading events to the internet in as close to real time as we’ve ever had.
This is a lady watching as a fixed wing 4th generation fighter hits a target right next to her house and it shakes the world. This is a ballsy as hell Ukrainian grandmother telling the Russian who is currently occupying her street corner to take these sunflower seeds for his pocket so that when he dies, he’ll grow the Ukrainian national flower.
The hell that is war, modern war between two actually mechanized powers, is visiting the streets of a modernized European power and displacing people who are used to WiFi and continuous power and all the modern conveniences we take for absolute granted every single day. For them, that safety of the modern world has come to an end. Safety is a fragile thing, subjective and fleeting. It takes very little force to turn the safety of everyone getting along into the danger of warfare come to your streets. Ukraine shows us it happens to more than just “the third world”
But we can do nothing for Ukraine by simply being morose. Which makes this the first serious war to include memes an interesting look at how we communicate in the 21st Century. The meme has become so globally accepted as a method of communication that governments, even governments at war, are using them.
They are an international cultural norm now.
Take it away, Brandon.
