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I'm haunted by a Ukrainian cab driver in Barcelona [1]

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Date: 2023-09-16

Two weeks ago I was traveling in Barcelona. I hailed a cab and got a ride. The cab driver and I spoke in Spanish. We had a pleasant conversation even as I fumbled through verb conjugations and gendered articles of speech. I told him I was from Philadelphia. One of the great things about living in the birthplace of America is that most people in the world know Philly. As I left the cab he revealed that he was from Ukraine originally, and said these haunting words to me in English:

Thank you American people for your support of the people of Ukraine. Thank you. Thank you. Bless you.

I was caught off guard as I clumsily said thank you to the people of Ukraine, too. I was not expecting the diaspora caused by the Russian genocidal campaign in Ukraine to spill into a cab in the heart of Barcelona. But spill it has, along with the blood and tears of children, grandmothers, families, and untold thousands of men and women on the front lines defending their way of life, and their ancestral homeland against a force that would topple other countries like America from within and without.

It’s trying as we speak.

And America is not even sending troops. We're sending dollars and bullets. And many of moral cowardice want to stop doing even that.

Do we deserve to be thanked? I hope so. We are sending only 0.33% of our GDP in support as Ukrainian aid, primarily in the form of humanitarian, economic, weapons, and security assistance. That’s over 80 billion dollars so far. Contrast that to the 700 billion we by necessity spent on TARP just to rescue “troubled assets.”

Have you ever traveled to Europe? Particularly in the 50 years after World War II, what did you hear from any European people you engaged with? Thanks. Heartfelt and often tearful thanks from Europeans like the French who will always remember the beaches of Normandy. The turning of the tide against fascism and Nazism in particular. For what was Nazism?

Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, scientific racism, white supremacy, social Darwinism and the use of eugenics into its creed.

Without American aid in the form of dollars, bullets, and eventually blood, what do you think the rest of human history would have looked like? Where would we be as Americans right now without free European partnership?

Supporting Ukraine is stopping Putin and all the violent ugliness he represents. Stopping Putin is central to deterring China’s ugly ambitions in Taiwan and Asia. The Chinese are absolutely watching, and calculating. Supporting Ukraine is key to establishing that we still have our friends’ backs, and that we are not isolationist cowards ready to look the other way as authoritarianism rises, even within our own borders. It’s living up to a cab driver’s humble thanks on the world stage.

We get what we pay for, and those American political figures lining up to trash the economy, ram through draconian domestic spending cuts, default on the national debt, and force government shutdowns are also the ones demanding we abandon Ukraine and the 0.33% on the dollar we’ve spent in their name.

I’m not a policy wonk. I’m not a historian or political scientist or foreign policy expert. I’m just a family doctor, but I care for people. I care about health and happiness and defending those cherished ideals against the horrors of disease, cancer, and despair. The world is a kind of superorganism. Among it’s many ills right now is a basic struggle between an enlightened preservation of human freedom that is a precondition for tending to the world’s problems, and a dark regression towards human control through fear and isolation. That would be a guarantee for failure in the face of climate change, the real planetary scourge, which requires coordinated open partnership among nations to slow and avert the worst that is yet to come.

We’ve kind of been here before. In 1937 FDR gave a speech in which he likened international aggression to a disease that other nations must work to "quarantine." Had the isolationist mood in the country been different before Pearl Harbor, perhaps an ounce of prevention applied early (instead of the heavy toll needed later to extricate the world from tyranny) would have prevented some of the worst nightmares of WWII.

Russian lust for power, as demonstrated by this latest and most brazen invasion of a sovereign neighbor, is manifest domestically in the murder of journalists, the stifling of free speech, the intimidation of dissenters, the loss of human rights, the silencing of voices of conscience, and the intolerance of diversity.

That’s what these regimes do. And that’s what those who support and apologize for these regimes might do eventually, too.

I remain haunted by that Ukrainian cab driver’s expression of gratitude toward the American people. I’m happy to share it here. I hope we’ve earned it so far, resting comfortably as we are in cozy homes with four walls, ceilings, running water and unbloodied family members — free to type articles and set them free like messages in the bottle across the Atlantic.

~

Thank you for reading. Do you share my opinions? As noted I’m a family doc, and I write a medical newsletter called Examined. Feel free to let me know if I’ve stepped outside my medical wheelhouse here with this political essay.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/16/2193643/-I-m-haunted-by-a-Ukrainian-cab-driver-in-Barcelona

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