Just Ask The Question Newsletter
2/28/22 SPECIAL UKRAINE UPDATE
Welcome back to the Just Ask the Question newsletter where we share insights on the White House and politics in general through podcast interviews, original articles and commentary.
And because everyone deserves a break now and then from all that is D.C., we will also share the lighter side of the news with exclusive interviews from leading pop culture figures. sign up here
Putin, Atticus Finch and Nuclear War
Trump admires Putin's "Genius" while Biden tries to prevent a global catastrophe
By Brian J. Karem
At one point in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch lectures his son Jem about courage after forcing him to care for an aging woman who is struggling to beat drug addiction.
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do,”
author Harper Lee wrote.
That is the courage of the Ukrainian people, despite the cries of the far right in the United States - some of whom are the very same people who ban books like “To Kill A Mockingbird” - who have decided to praise Vladimir Putin and Russia.
While historians and journalists are comparing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi’s land grab in Czechoslovakia in 1939, and some U.S. politicians are doing their best to play this generation’s Neville Chamberlain, others are not going gentle into that good night….
Episode 123: UKRAINE SPECIAL EDITION with guest Joel Wasserman - Can Ukraine survive?
Joel Wasserman is an American who grew up outside of Washington D.C. and once played football at Richard Montgomery high School in Rockville, MD.
Today he teaches English in Ukraine where he lives with his girlfriend. He has seen the buildup and the war in Ukraine first hand.
He joins us now to talk about it.
Putin's threat to the world grows — and much of our news media is not up to the challenge.
I grew up under the fear of nuclear war. The news we consume now is often lacking in crucial context
By Brian Karem
think "The Golden Girls" puppet show may hold the key to our future.
But first, the past, when we thought we might not have a future: Once a month when I was an elementary school student our school conducted "disaster" drills. This was different from our monthly fire drills. To practice for a school fire, when the warning bell sounded we all gathered together and walked single file out of the school, quickly and quietly. More than a few of us, while standing outside waiting for the all clear, gleefully imagined our schools burning down as we watched.
The disaster drills were quite different. When the alarm sounded for a disaster drill we walked into the hall single file, sat against the wall with our legs crossed and were told to "duck and cover." The disasters we were told we prepared for were tornadoes and/or nuclear war.
The idea of protecting yourself from a nearby nuclear explosion seems quaint or futile today. For those of us who came of age in those times, there's no way to adequately explain our fear that the Soviet Union and the United States would destroy themselves in a paroxysm of nuclear violence, ending life as we knew it on our planet…