Inside the Ukrainian ring

 

Subject: Inside the Ukrainian ring.

Like a boxers we shuffle around in our corner waiting for the bell to clang. In the red corner our opponent glowers across the ring barely listening to the referee or the rules of engagement. This fight had long been in the offering since the purse is simply too high to ignore, it goes to the root of the fight game, once a noble calling for young men to convert their masculinity into a rule based system now dissipated by the huge rewards on offer.  
In the green corner, the corner which purports to follow the rules, sits an over weight contestant perspiring from the heat but also from a lack of confidence that he can get the job done. His trainer, an old man clearly going through the phases of executive power but wondering why he had allowed himself to be elected as the hope of the nation when all he wanted was to get his feet up. On the other side of the ring a lean confident trainer who has nurtured this moment, the reawakening of some sort of national Valhalla leans across his young, sparsely built protégé sensing his weakness he drives him on with clichés of past glories and potential reward. The contest, if it were ever such, slowly going his way so as long as he can find more young blood to spill.
There are many who find the fight game reprehensible, a denial of all that mankind has struggled to represent and yet it also represents the old way of sorting out a wrong. The contribution of conciliation and reconciliation, where combatants retire to their respective corners unbloodied having failed to land a punch but not having had chance to test the other in their battle and their right to reclaim a perceived grievance is now back in the promoters office, the money already in his bank. There’s nothing like an arms contest to make the tills ring and people are making themselves very rich as we talk.
Should all our grievances be resolved by talk or is talk simply too complicated to be left in the hands of the human rights lawyer or the divorce attorney. Are there somethings which can’t be translated into words, where passion out bids the rationality of the court room. The slow rumbling of passion, like lava flowing from a volcano is impervious to reason it  has to find its course and create new promontories, a new landscape on which to bolster its sureties, until of course the next time !