About a Narrative of Hearts and Minds

It's been a difficult Revolution in Ukraine, coming up on 2 years now since it's inception, a lot of people hurt, killed, a battered economy, a  lot of WTF...... ?

Petro Poroshenko seems to have grabbed the Bull by the Horns and ridden out the worst of it : he has got the Presidential thing down, a lot of earnest and sober conferencing is happening, the game plan for next year is being shaped up.

Ukraine's economy isn't maybe what I'd call a hybrid, an enigma, more that it's like a unique niche economic mechanism pushing itself along, for all the sorrows and troubles at the bottom, the middle class enjoys what they have, they have a lot most Americans can't really appreciate.
Soon enough in the Spring, the doors of tourism will perhaps burst open, harnessing the energy of lots of talented intelligent young people. "welcome to Ukraine" it's an often painful rather than joyful reference, it's the variability of service and friendliness : what people have to remember is that most workers are still making 1 $ an hour for their time. The idea of cocktail waitresses making 200,000$ a year in San Francisco, or 50,000$ a month in Las Vegas. The average person's mood is going to be a lot different if they make 10$ a day versus 2,000$ a day. The cost of food is not that much different between California/ Nevada and Ukraine. This is people in/ from Ukraine who live in the USA saying it,  not just me: of course you can get a good bag of grocery for 10$ in Ukraine stores. But for us it's like totally shocking to see 5/7 huge center aisles simply filled with Vodka and booze!

The Produce here is often so terrible, I look at Broccoli  and it's crap, old, flowers breaking open, not a significant difference in price. Bell Peppers from Denmark, Persimmons from Spain, just about the only winter veggie is like cabbage, no squash in the markets, the zucchini looks weird most of the time. Maybe the problem is that Corporate entities built these huge cold storage facilities in the prime veggie regions, Kherson and so on, and they simply str away and ship out the good stuff to Europe ? They also are not hip to "Heirloom tomato ",  everything I get served, is some kind of Monsanto hybrid that tastes like a card board tomato. Not unusual for the restaurant to not have half the salads on their menu available.

   It used to be that in Ukraine it was "we keep the best for ourself" now sometimes, I kind of feel like the best is simply gone, taken off : Russia took the best of Ukraine , in a cunning,  underhanded way by taking Crimea. These scenarios for taking Crimea were developed years ahead of time : they did not generate a vast trove of uniforms without insignias just in the space of 8-10 weeks, somewhere there was a sewing shop and there was a distribution to Russian Military bases in Crimea. I remember being at a TECH talk in Palo Alto just after the "annexation " and the Russians who were heavily peppered into the crowd were simply jubilant about it, but not all of them, some expressed concern about the economic implications.
 So when we, as "Western People" risk making ourselves sound like idiots and say stuff ,  add labels like "those Russians " It really means we maybe enjoy our power of sanctions that throw the Rouble into a slide and cost some granny in some town her savings at the bank, she can't buy half the sausage and drinks for winter holidays. Sanctions don't affect the resources Russia can deploy to make war in Ukraine, not a lot anyway.

SO I was thinking about all those people who got a lot more deeper into the Maidan than I was able to, and how they have to think back, two years later, all people make mistakes, choices. I made my choices to not stick around Kyiv too much, see other cities like Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, Simferopol , Odessa, even Khirovogrhad. I was thinking of an allegory for the Maidan revolution, like a cluster of white blood cells around an infection. The Maidan's  opponents said they lived like animals, in my opinion it was like an organism : a biological force referendum about social change.'
There were people from all over FSU countries, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia , supporting that moment in time, yet as it dragged on towards the inevitable , it was the Ukrainians who held the line at the end, facing death that they knew was in the offing. They chose to live or die, to keep the organism of change alive. A lot of people lost friends and family in that. The American Revolutionary war lasted as I read it 8 years, but I've heard 15. Ukraine doesn't seem afraid to engage in 8 years of war, but they want Peace, some way, some how : Now , more than ever )'

But when will the change in people's minds hit the streets and jump start a new economy ? It's waiting to happen, just maybe not today .....