It is heartbreaking to realize that we have been faced with the devastation caused by an evil dictator’s wrongful invasion of the independent nation of Ukraine for two years. For two years the world has witnessed battlefield death; civilians bombed, murdered, tortured, and raped; children killed, maimed, and orphaned; and entire cities wiped off the face of the Earth just to satisfy the ego-maniacal whims of the psychopathic dictator of an oppressor state.
For two years I have been saying – as a person who has dedicated his adult life to seeking justice – that I am dismayed on a daily basis by the catastrophic injustice that is Putin’s unjustifiable war against Ukraine. But as citizens of Santa Barbara County what can we do? This is what we can do! Doing and saying nothing is not an option.
As Bishop Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Holocaust survivor and author Elie Weisel said: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”