Cork Views: A Ukrainian boy’s birthday wish ... while bullies rule the world
Closing his eyes, he took a minute to make his birthday wish. Around the table we all silently guessed, and willed, his wish to come true.
No-one asked, but we were all pretty sure he wished to see his father who he hasn’t seen for two birthdays now.
This boy is growing up fast, like all children do. He is growing up in precarious hotel accommodation with his mother and grandmother in a country 3,000km from home. Five accommodation centres and two schools in 17 months.
There, children spend much of their school days doing their lessons in air raid bunkers. Happy childhoods are incompatible with war.
If this gentle boy had wished for something attainable like a new bike or computer game, we could make it come true, but the idea of reunification with his father and home-place seems like a far-off dream.
This felt even more impossible the day after President Trump clashed with President Zelensky in the Oval Office in a room of supposed grown-ups. Trump called it good television; I watched it through my fingers in horror.
I watched, hoping that someone would pipe up, saying: ‘Go easy on the man. He’s in the middle of fighting a war. Forgive him for not trusting a possible ceasefire agreement with Putin, the man responsible for the deaths of 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 12,000 civilians. He doesn’t want to surrender half his country’s mineral wealth to help build your electric cars, only for Russia to roll back across the border next year.”
But no, no-one spoke up.
There wasn’t a shred of empathy or humanity in the room.
The men in suits harangued the man not wearing a suit, pointing fingers, demanding gratitude.
The American people have been strong supporters of Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, but the Trump administration has done nothing for Zelensky to be thankful for.
Unbelievably, one of the first questions to Zelensky from a member of the press corps asked why he wasn’t wearing a suit at the White House - this from a nation whose people visit the wonders of the world wearing oversized t-shirts, sweat pants, and box bright white trainers.
Zelensky doesn’t wear a suit because he is in the middle of a war (see above!) and has more to be doing than thinking of what shade of tie he should wear for his next political engagement where he pleads for the continued existence of his nation and people.
He has worn this black jumper, trouser and boots combo throughout the ongoing war as a show of solidarity with his soldiers who have risked their lives on the frontline.
Trump’s style of ‘diplomacy’ has all the hallmarks of a bully. Coercion, intimidation and low impulse control. “Give me half your rare earth minerals, or else”.
If he was a primary school child, we’d be having words with his parents, but at 78 years of age he is beyond repair. Damage control is the only approach.
They say don’t give a bully the satisfaction of an emotional response. You are supposed to shrug their assault off because to react is to feed their hunger for making other people feel worse than they do. Avoid emotional escalation.
But, man, I’m so tired of aggressive men disrupting the lives of millions with impunity.
Watching the Oval Office display of public humiliation, I got the mammy rage that rises when you are sick of listening to the incessant squabbling of boys and want to bang their heads off each other to knock some sense into them.
Re-watching Trump and JD Vance squandering their privileged power, using it to bully a wartime leader like Zelensky, I thought about the children in places like Ukraine, Gaza and Congo making their birthday wishes, waiting for selfish men to decide what happens next. Children whose desires aren’t for toys or games, but for safety, for family, for normality.
If only the ones pulling the strings could sit at that birthday table and really feel, even for a moment, what it’s like to wish for something as simple - and as unreachable - as home.
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