Mar 4, 2022 4 min read

If I were a drinker of vodka, I would pour out the Russian stuff. Or I could post sunflowers or the yellow and blue of the Ukraine flag on my social media page.

But talk about feeling helpless. Watch the refugees holding their babies and cats as they wait in the cold to cross over to safety, or see the exhausted mothers huddled in the subway trying to keep their toddlers entertained, and you recognize how desperate the suffering is, and how hopelessly out of our reach.

If those families had wandered into my neighborhood, I would offer food and toys and blankets. My friends would do the same. I could offer my basement bedroom for a warm night’s sleep. Play with the toddlers so their mothers could get some rest. Offer my laptop so they could send messages back home.

But this is a crisis that we in the west can only observe from a distance. After watching wall-to-wall coverage for the first five days, I finally had to turn away and turn it off. Following the coverage only reenforced this feeling of helplessness. Every mother I know will watch those scenes from the bomb shelters and cast her own memory back to a trying, miserable day when a holiday flight was delayed and a long night was spent huddled with small kids at the airport gate. That was an unpleasant inconvenience.

Those mothers in Ukraine are terrified, and stranded.

CNN spends a lot of time predicting doom. It didn’t take their anchors, or their parade of retired generals, to tell me we’re all in big trouble if this plays out in the worst-case scenario. We all know what’s a stake, and at some point we have to trust there are enough smart people on the right side of this to prevent the worst from happening.

But the worst is already happening to the refugees. With the fathers and sons staying behind to fight, the women and children are adrift, dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Americans are donating money, as I have. But before I did, I went to a watchdog site to confirm that the charity I chose has a low enough overhead that my donation will end up where it’s needed and not in the severance package of some CEO. The site called Charity Watch is a good one; there, you can research a charity before you open your wallet. Plenty of humanitarian aid organizations are doing what they can to help, and the honest and effective ones deserve our support.

It’s been almost two years since we all watched the COVID crisis begin to unfold. For most of a year, we hid in our homes and in our friend pods and behind masks until the vaccines arrived and began to set us free. Science saved most of us, but the waiting was scary.

And here we go again, poking our heads out of the pandemic cave, just in time to see bombs bursting on the other side of the world. What’s that Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times? To quote a Facebook post I saw this week, “Screw your interesting times.”

Destructive and frightening as COVID was (and maybe still is), there were things we could do to manage the risk: stay at home, wash our hands, wear a mask, get the shots. This next crisis? From where I’m standing, there’s almost nothing to do but wait and watch and hope. Maybe send some money, and think about how we would help those moms and babies, if only they weren’t so far away.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.