What is there left to do?

You know, there comes a time in the history of every people, every ethnic group, every religion when we have had to fight. We have called upon our gods and no bolt of lightning came down to smite the oppressor. We pray for a swift end, and instead, we are tortured. We pray for the war to stop and for men to join hands and work for the good of our species. Because, if you think about it, no one ever really wins a war. When young men have spilled their blood for the greater good, where silent battlefields play host to an army of ghosts a million strong – then, no one wins.

And what is there left to do, when all hope seems lost and the bombs rain down on apartment complexes and somewhere in a gray city beneath a black sky a group of old white men sit around a long table and plot the destruction of the world? What can we do except look to our collective past and say, "We did it before, and we will do it again."

There is nothing human beings are better at than surviving, you know. So when we look at the news and see the bombed-out shell of a building in Kyiv, and see children doing their schoolwork in bunkers, and we want to turn out in outrage and scream and cry, "What did they – no, we – do to deserve this?," there is only one thing left to do. We turn inwards. We look to our country and our own peoples and our own histories and we join hands, as many as we can muster, all linked together. We vote. We protest. We donate. And we pray.