In times like this it is very hard to maintain equanimity and calm. Putin's putting forces on "special combat readiness" considerably ups the ante and takes us into territory we've not been to before. The Cuban Missile Crisis was before my day but I imagine we're in the same ballpark.
The difference now is this sense that Putin is doing crazy things from the position of a wounded animal, which makes him less predictable. Also that he knows now that he must win something to stay in power, otherwise he is gone.
His whiny justification about Russia having been a great power that was brought low through no fault of its own disregards some essential facts. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live. Its implementation of Communism failed to provide its citizens with the more than the barest rudiments of life. Sure, people figured out how to get by. The bread was good. Donuts were cheap. They improvised admirably with what they had. But it was boring as hell, the waste of human potential was immense and it wasn't going anywhere. One of Gorbachev's early reforms was to let city dwellers have little plots of land where they could grow their own food. Many grew potatoes. It was like that.
The West does not have it all figured out, far from it. Lots of people are left out of the general prosperity and lack the means of getting it. We don't have perfect consensus on how to remedy this. There is and always will be internal tension about the role of the state versus the role of individuals, families and other smaller units in addressing our problems. But there's a reason people clamor to move here from all around the world. We are fortunate that they do.
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