It is easy to find people in our area who have a connection to Ukraine. One of my grandmothers, Tillie Bueling, came to the United States in 1904. The daughter of Samuel and Anna Weight Menge, she arrived with her family on the SS Breslau at Baltimore, Maryland. One of her brothers was Fred Menge who is known to some in the community.
This family’s story could be placed side by side with most of the immigrants who eventually made their way to America. Invited to Ukraine by Catherine the Great because she hoped to raise the economic and cultural progress of the backward country she had come to rule over. How successful it was for the Germans can be debated, but successive rulers started cutting the promises Catherine had held out to them. And when life became unbearable they found their way to the United States.
Life is becoming unbearable in Ukraine again and refugees by the hundreds of thousands have headed westward to find safety in a NATO country. They left their homes behind. It is a painful sight to see them dragging their belongings in one suitcase trying to board a crowded train. Besides stressing over it, about the only thing my wife and I plan to do is send some money to a reputable agency in their name. Since Ukraine is not a NATO member we can only dream about sending the military in which would most likely start WWIII.
Dreaming of solutions reminds me of the story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” which is about a man who spent a lifetime with his daydreams. As the story unfolded, he at first imagines himself as a pilot of a large plane that is caught in a dangerous storm. Ice begins forming on the wings and the crew exhibits anxiety but not fear because Walter Mitty is at the controls.
As he drives past a hospital he experiences his next reverie, that of a famous doctor operating on a prominent man. The lifesaving machine malfunctions in the operating room but because he is a handyman, too, he repairs it with just an ink pen.
As he enters the parking lot, he gets into a bit of an argument with the attendant after which he sees a news headline that updates a famous trial taking place and Walter quickly becomes a defendant in a trial where he is accused of being a sharpshooter. The questioning attorney calls him a “miserable cur” which jolts Walter to remember he needs to go buy dogfood.
While waiting for his wife he finds a magazine containing an article debating whether or not Germany can rule the world with just air power. It leads him into a fantasy where he pilots a plane on a successful mission to bomb an ammunition factory.
Lastly, he waits for his wife outside a drugstore and lights a cigarette while leaning up against a brick wall. Now he becomes a war criminal facing a firing squad while proudly accepting his fate. We’ve not stated yet but Walter is a very henpicked man who slides into these reveries while anticipating his wife to criticize or order him about for some reason. It is his coping method.
James Thurber wrote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” as a short story which can be found with a search on the internet. The movie based on the story can also be watched on YouTube. We talk about all these things in this article because so many solutions about the Ukrainian conflict run through a person’s head, and yet we feel powerless. Maybe we are piloting a plane to drop a bomb on Russian military, operating on a wounded victim, or standing defiantly against a brick while staring into Putin’s eyes waiting for him to give the order to fire.
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