Ignorance is Bliss

I'm going to ignore the obvious news story of the day and concentrate on happier things!

 

I tried ignoring the news completely, if I'm honest, but there are always work colleagues who insist on keeping right up-to-date and insist on sharing the latest information with you. So, consequently, the situation in Eastern Europe was a topic of discussion after lunch today. I was asked my thoughts and replied with a nonchalant " The British media have only been covering it for the past two weeks because Covid numbers are falling and they need something new to scare us with. It's all brinkmanship and dick-waving and it will all blow over soon." At which point I was told "Actually, Russia have invaded!". So that shows you what I know!
I'm still not sure my life is enhanced by knowing about it all though. I can't do anything about it, and hopefully none of it will affect me directly in the near future. I could sit around and worry about oil prices and banking systems and a major European war that I might be called up to fight in. Or I could just accept that Mankind's default setting is Warmongering and this is always happening somewhere and will continue to do so ad infinitum. I don't think we're any closer to a nuclear conflict than we have been at any other point in the last fifty years or so. Around the time that I was born, we still had planes in the air at all times over Britain ready to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, and other planes carrying atomic bombs that could be readily taken over to whichever country had chosen to attack us. Should I feel in more danger now than I did then?

Either the whole thing will fizzle out, in which case life will go on as normal (in which case, we'll be unaffected), or it'll be a long, drawn-out conflict claiming tens of thousands of lives (in which case it will be just like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, etc, etc, but will still not affect me directly), or it'll all go tits-up spectacularly and Russia will chuck a nuclear weapon at London (in which case it'll all be over before I really have time to worry about it).
For someone who said 'I'm going to ignore the obvious...' in the first sentence of this blog posting, I haven't half gone on about it!

 

But, really, we've just been through the horrors of a two-year pandemic with all its ups-and-downs and variants and deaths. We've been through a global depression this century that could have crippled the World, we've dealt with terrorism, disasters, plane crashes and genocides. We've lived through a Cold War, IRA bombings and countless unjust invasions in countless global locations. Some in this country can even remember the 6-year nightmare of World War Two. 

We made it through all that, we can make it through whatever happens in and around Ukraine over the next few weeks, I'm sure.

RC 24-2-22