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Get a cup of coffee, this is a long one.

Today’s NYT quotes a Ukrainian wife and mother as rejecting the “resilient” description of that country’s people’s ability to survive four years of merciless Russian attacks. It was an echo of what New Orleans civil rights attorney Tracie Washington said about the Crescent City in the post-flood recovery of 2008. “Stop calling me resilient. I’m not resilient. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ you can do something else to me.”

Some history. The devastating 2005 flood in New Orleans was, as a co-author of a UC Berkeley examination into the event called it, “the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl.” An arm of the U.S. Government, the Army Corps of Engineers had built a “hurricane protection system”—a system in name only, the then-head of the Corps later admitted—that failed in more than 50 locations under conditions it was supposedly designed to withstand. In the wake of the disaster, FEMA fumbled the job of supporting the recovery. And a Federal program designed to help homeowners rebuild—the “Road Home”—reflected Washington’s distrust of New Orleans by placing legislative obstacles in that road. (This history is recounted in my film documentary, “The Big Uneasy”.)

There was no grand plan for recovery, aside from the then-mayor (later to be jailed) dreaming of a line of casinos on one of the city’s historic avenues. The city rebuilt slowly, one house, one restaurant, one business at a time. Traci Washington’s cri de coeur reflected the suspicion that the improbable strength of that recovery obviated the need for help in preventing the next disaster. (She was right)

History, per Twain, rhymes. In 1990, then-Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Gorbachev that the fall of the Berlin Wall would not be followed by eastward expansion of NATO. (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early)

We all know what happened soon after, as the United States sponsored NATO membership for a series of Eastern European nations. That was good for those nations, but certainly left Russian leaders, including the rising Putin, with a sense of betrayal. Despite its size, or maybe because of it, Russia has long before Putin harbored a fear of invasion from the west, maybe because Germany did that…twice in the last century. Ukraine was an outlier, not absorbed into NATO, and Putin took the opportunity to bring it under Russian control. The Ukrainians have bravely resisted for four long and bloody years. During that time, help from the United States has been reluctant and halting. A country that was supposed to have collapsed quickly under Russian brutality has somehow withstood and survived. The Ukrainian mother quoted by the NYT is seeing the same thing Traci Washington did—that the according of “resilience” is not necessarily a compliment, but an excuse.