Welcome to Reality’s Theatre of the Absurd
Ілюстрація: facebook С.Марченко
Source: Author’s Facebook page
To grasp the full absurdity of the idea of exchanging Ukrainian territories for Ukrainian territories, imagine living in your parents’ apartment, once home to your grandparents, where you were born and raised. You hold all the legal documents, and the property is duly registered in your name under the law.
And then your friendly neighbor rings the doorbell, “just to borrow some salt” — and greets you with a baseball bat to the head. You wake up, bleeding, to find him lounging in your kitchen with his drinking buddies, happily emptying your fridge.
You try to throw him out, but he’s barricaded himself in and shows no intention of giving your kitchen back.
And that’s when the real circus begins. All the “decent” folks in the building — Uncle Sasha, who used to slip you candy as a kid; Aunt Olya with her army of cats; Dimka, your old partner in crime from the apple orchards — suddenly avert their eyes. They are purring: “Seryozha, you know we’re on your side! But… you understand he’s stronger, right? Just give him the kitchen! We can’t live like this anymore — all these shouting matches from morning till night, we’re not getting any sleep, the children are scared.”
You’re fuming, but what can you do? People are people — not everyone’s blessed with a spine. So, you call the police.
The policeman arrives fifteen minutes later. To your surprise, he strolls right past you and warmly embraces your thug of a neighbor. The two of them retreat to your kitchen, chatting away as if they were old friends planning a barbecue.
When the policeman finally emerges, he beams and announces that everything is settled. You will hand over the kitchen to your neighbor, and in return, he will graciously allow you to use your washroom.
You assume this is some sort of bad joke and patiently explain that you don’t need your neighbor’s permission to use your toilet — because, minor detail, it’s yours. Just like the rest of the apartment.
The policeman gives you the kind of look usually reserved for people who think the Earth is flat, and starts losing his patience. Yes, yes, he says, ownership is all well and good — but you must face REALITY. And reality, in his view, is this: there’s a Korean friend of your neighbor currently occupying your toilet. You don’t control it. You should be grateful that the “agreement” leaves you with two rooms, while the kitchen becomes your neighbor’s kingdom. Oh, and you can still use the washroom… provided you’re polite about it.
Absurd? Absolutely. Laughably idiotic. The sort of scenario you’d never believe could happen in the real world.
Except — surprise! — we do live in the real world. And in this very real world, the President of the United States is quietly haggling behind our backs with a war criminal named Vladimir Putin over how much of our land and our people to gift him in exchange for his solemn promise to leave us alone.
A promise, incidentally, that he has already made — and broken. First, in the Minsk Agreements. Before that, in the so-called Great Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation of May 31, 1997. And even earlier, in the Budapest Memorandum of December 5, 1994, where he signed on as a guarantor of Ukraine’s security.
What a charming little tower of broken promises. If this were Monopoly, he’d have already bankrupted the truth and mortgaged reality twice over.
In other words, in the world we inhabit, the absurd isn’t just possible — it’s unfolding right in front of us. And we’re stuck in the lead role.
I have no taste for this kind of farce. That’s why I’m in the army. And when people ask why I enlisted despite all my diagnoses, this is why.
Because all these “good people” so eager to hand us over to Putin, just so he leaves them alone, don’t grasp a simple truth: nothing can be decided for us as long as we exist. And we do exist — and we will go on living on our land, no matter what.
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