When we talk about politics, whether domestic or international, Eoo usually tries not to take sides. Too different is our way of life to fall into the traps and dualisms of political facts. We are for not being against.
But in front of these facts that I am going to tell, one cannot help but be outraged.
Let us take a famous, world-class, American basketball player who decides to play in Russia: Brittney Griner. This athlete, before boarding a plane, decides to put marijuana in her bag. And off she goes, about to pass through security in Russia, a country not too soft on this kind of behavior. Busted, 9-year prison sentence.
We can get as indignant as we want, hold marches and protests, calling the Russian penal system excessive, but unfortunately in Russia they decide, even if we disagree. They have the right, wrong or unjust, to keep the famous basketball player in jail. Everything comes out during these months: same-sex marriage, tolerance of soft drugs, “Grandpa” Biden promising to do everything to free one of the many emblems of the West from the killer bear. Indignation, righteous. The good values of the West, even if superficial, against a system, Russia’s, already oppressive internally, which with the Ukraine affaire also becomes an exporter of death.
Then the good news! We free her, a barter: for the release of the basketball player the Russians get the release of a known arms dealer, of death. If I were a father or mother of a child who died as a result of this gentleman’s trades, I would be outraged at this murderer returning to freedom. Before then the same would be indignant against her, I would be the athlete, who by virtue of his guilty presumption felt to abuse his snootiness of impunity and imperviousness to all criminal rights in the world, I would feel guilty about the release of a murderer.
And with a shudder of humility I would declare my repentance for an unforgivable lightness, apologizing to the victims.
