“We need each other, not because we want to love each other. We don’t want and we don’t need to be loved. We simply need to hold normal, pragmatic relations with a major country upon which… a lot in the world depends” — Vassily Nebenzia, Russian ambassador to the United Nations.
“Even small steps in reducing tensions would be in everybody’s interest” — Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö.
It doesn't matter whether you dislike or like Trump or Putin. Political preferences aside, we need each other, and this is about reaching out to one another, meeting, finding common ground and maintaining peaceful relations on this tiny planetary cradle we call our world. And this was my post today during the Helsinki Summit:
The point of this meeting between the USA and Russia is to prevent war, which would inevitably lead to nuclear annihilation of all of us. For those of you with your heads buried in the sand, for those of you screaming blasphemy for daring to talk with the Russians, for those of you dancing and screaming like apes on top of the nuclear bomb, waving your arms hysterically and pointing fingers of blame and putting politics before common sense, how easily you forget that both sides have enough nuclear firepower pointed at one another to destroy each country and the entire world hundreds of times over. In which case, none of you here today arguing against this meeting will continue to exist. Your arguments against Russia will fall on deaf ears on a dark and dead planet. You don’t get it. Putin knows this. Trump knows this. They get it. And despite our differences, they have to be practical. They know we have to talk. We have to find common ground and ways to scale back.
If John F. Kennedy had chosen to ignore Nikita Khrushchev, refused to talk with him, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I would never have been born three decades later. None of you arguing with such vitriol against talks with Russia would be here today in the online forums having this discussion. There would be no world today, as you know it.
We’re hypocrites. We blame Russia for interfering in an election, for buying advertisements on Facebook, for an election outcome that came about because of our own doing, not because of some outside influence. How easily we forget how many times the USA has interfered in the elections and overthrow of other countries, how we interfered in the Ukraine, Crimea, and Russian affairs. Yet if Russia told us what we had to do with Hawaii or Puerto Rico in the way we told them what to do about the Ukraine and Crimea, we’d be screaming blood. We're two-faced. And yes, this is the same kind of witch-hunt as the McCarthy Era. It was before my time, and still, I think we should hang our heads in shame for the finger pointing and blame we are doing today.
We have become so polarized. So filled with hate toward one another. And yet, it doesn’t really matter what your political orientation is, whether you’re left or right. The bomb doesn’t care which side you're on. It can destroy everything.
