Joyce Fegan: Despairing over Ukraine? There is something you can do

A little girl waiting at a train station in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

A young woman with blonde hair smiles spontaneously, with gentle ease, when she realises the passing phone's camera has landed on her. 

She was in the midst of her work prior to the small intrusion, sitting on a kind of a bed about a foot off the ground. With the help of a small oxygen tank, a mask and several tubes, she is single-handedly tending to every breath of a newborn baby.

The camera continues to pan across what looks like the basement post room of some large company's headquarters. But there's no mail, just newborn babies swaddled in blankets that are wrapped like cocoons. 

There are more tubes and more women in scrubs tending to these babies' breaths. And then there are less fragile babies, wrapped in fleece blankets, gently being bounced around the windowless room in the arms of more women, also in scrubs.

In a corner, there are a scatter of backpacks with rolled-up mats — pre-emptive beds — attached to the bottom of them. A basement room of a hospital in Dnipro, in easter Ukraine, is now both a makeshift bomb shelter and a neonatal intensive care unit, as filmed by Dr Denis Surkov, and shared with The New York Times.

In one room in the world, a group of humans dedicate every bit of themselves to sustaining life, while in another room, a group of humans very consciously plan for the aimless destruction of it. It is this dichotomy in our humanity that seems to always be beyond our comprehension.

How is it that one member of our species could be so severed from their humanity that they would intentionally kill innocent men, women, and children for no justifiable reason and that another member can be so connected to their humanity that they put themselves in harm's way to save the day-old life of a stranger?

Almost all of us fall into the latter category. And yet it seems that those with the most power fall into the former one. "War in Ukraine". "Russia's launches full-scale invasion of Ukraine". There's been talk of this for weeks. But we finally woke up to the news of its reality this week.

And here we are in the West plunged into our powerlessness all over again. And ignorance. How many of us are experts in Russian-Ukrainian affairs? I certainly am not. But most of us are experts in humanity — we live to help.

The scramble to find out more begins: the why behind the invasion, the long and winding history preceding the move. As if we can stop war and death and the destruction of strangers' lives through the consumption of enough information via our various technological devices. As if we can offset our sense of guilt and privilege by consuming all of the information pertaining to Russia and Ukraine.

Information that serves to paralyse us. Information and imagery that terrifies us into further inaction.

People fleeing Ukraine arrive at a train station in Przemysl, Poland, on Friday. Photo: AP/Petr David Josek

“You won’t ever get to the end of the internet or the end of Twitter. We need to be incredibly aware and mindful of that,” said Jeff Guenther this week, an American therapist who also runs a national therapist directory in the United States called Therapy Den.

He was commenting about how common it is now for clients to mention major news events like the pandemic, and now the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, in their therapy sessions thousands of miles away in North America.

Between the pandemic and this conflict, people are feeling a sense of "powerlessness", he said. It's not cold hard data, it's anecdotal — it's from his frontline role as a therapist. It's hard to reckon with our powerlessness and our privilege. 

Some of us will sit down this weekend with a glass of wine or beer, kids put to bed, Netflix on. Others will enjoy a hot shower after a nice round of golf or a kick-around with friends. How can we be this well-off and yet be so powerless? What can we do with our care?

Many of us will go down the rabbit hole of information to offset the guilt, hoping that the consumption of news is an honourable act in the face of global horror and the woes of war. Others switch the dial to Lyric or Sunshine FM, paying extra special attention to their kids or friends.

Mr Guenther, the American therapist, said being "consistent in your daily routine" is both a normal and healthy response to this despair. So too is thinking carefully about how much information you can actually take in.

There is a sort of a belief out there that news consumption is a moral obligation. A euro for every time you've heard from a friend: "I'm terrible I don't follow the news", how rich would you be?

The powerlessness that some feel prompts actively choosing so-called ignorance. But the same act prompts more guilt, based on the perceived moral failing of "not being informed".

Which prompts the question, what can you do about what's going on in Ukraine based on everything you've read so far? Get on the next flight east? Request to be conscripted to the Ukrainian army? Dismantle a bomb? Stand in the way of a fighter jet's air missiles? 

The futility

It feels futile, that we, the people who care, the people who would if they could stand over every breath of a premature baby in a makeshift bomb shelter in Dnipro, cannot actually do anything of the kind. And yet powerlessness doesn't feel like an adequate response either, because it is not.

There are several choices still to be made in our perceived sense of powerlessness. We can choose firstly to consume only so much information and to then take action — reconfigure the scales of input versus output. 

We can listen to the voices of Ukrainians. If you listen, they're asking for shows of solidarity and public condemnations of international war crimes. We can lobby our political leaders in Europe to do this, for them. We can use our voices and our signatures to call for sanctions against Russia. 

If you think signing a letter or attending a protest is futile, imagine a Russian or Ukrainian citizen's fear at doing this on their soil. And on our turf, there is so much we can do.

A firefighter inspects the damage at a building following a rocket attack on Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday. Photo: Ukrainian Police Department Press Service via AP

When the time comes, and it will, when we're welcoming Ukrainian people here as refugees, will we only be able to take 200, or will we be able to take 2,000? Right now we can demand that our system of "direct provision" in its current form has ended by 2024 as promised and that refugees have access to jobs, education, and housing. 

Many of the thousands of people currently stuck in direct provision here cannot exit because there isn't enough available housing, publicly or on the private rental market. That is beyond fixable. No powerlessness here.

When we rightly despair over the war out there, let's redirect our energy to get our house in order over here, so that we are in a position to do something concrete to help the people currently needing our support, and to those who may need it in the future.