A long time ago, when I was a kid, I’m not sure exactly when but surely before the seventh grade, I had one of the most memorable and traumatic thirty seconds of my life. It was at a summer camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains up the hill from Los Gatos. The camp was at a school named the Montezuma Mountain School for Boys and the only reason I know the name is because I went to a photography weekend retreat at the same location but with a different name about forty to fifty years later. During the photography school, it started to dawn on me that I had been at the same location years before.

I don’t remember anything about that summer or the summer camp except for a thirty-second burst of violence. There were four of us sitting on the ground in a sort of circle, in the shade of a building. I have no idea why, maybe we were waiting for the cafeteria to open, maybe they were giving out free balloons, all I remember is that we were sitting in the shade with one guy leaning up against the stucco wall, I’m going to call the wall-leaner Ben. Ben may have been younger or he may have been lower on the cool-guy scale, either way, he was sitting with his back to the wall.

An older camper, way higher on the cool-guy scale than us, joined us and started asserting his dominance. Then, Mister Cool punched Ben in the face. For no observable reason. Just leaned into the circle and punched the poor guy in the face. Hard enough to draw blood (and tears).

I’m reminded of that senseless attack by Putin’s senseless attack on Ukraine. What a prick! Putin is a narcissistic sociopath with no regard for the carnage he is creating other than how it might help him. When Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv, they left behind a devastated landscape littered with dead bodies, a population traumatized by rape and murder, and destroyed houses and schools, the result of an army that was more of a mob than an effective military force. When the units got back to Moscow, Putin rewarded them with medals. Even now, the Russians will occasionally lop a missile into some city far from the battle lines – aiming at an apartment house or a maternity hospital to kill civilians – for no reason other than he is trying to terrorize the population. Other people’s pain means nothing to Putin so powerful is his imagined self-importance.

Now Putin’s army is cutting off the export of Ukrainian grain and cooking oil, trying to use the starvation of uninvolved people as a lever. It is hard to imagine that level of inhumanity but some people are evil, irredeemably so.

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