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Callback to most recent episode about "the two selves".
Vladimir Putin has his "finger on the button" right now. He wants to be seen as a leader of a powerful nation. If the current excursion in the Ukraine doesn't support that image he holds of himself this will cause (in my prediction) the worst version of Vladimir Putin to be shown to us. He may take more extreme measures to make the world see him the way he wants to be seen. We have not seen any sign of humility in Putin before so we cannot but hope that he still has some to balance out his psychological situation.
Some people who might be seen as "apologists" are making these sorts of arguments. I understand their concern but this amounts to appeasement and would be a failure of courage. Bullies must be opposed. If they cannot be prevented from getting what they want then at the very, very least they must be made to understand that the price they must pay is higher rather than lower.
Suicide is a strange thing. Its existence would seem to contradict everything we know about the instinct to survive. But knowing that there is a powerful instinct to continue that is overcome by something inside real humans should tell us about the strength of the thing that overcomes it.
Suicide has more than one single cause. The greater cause is hopelessness. One form of hopelessness is the belief that a person may never be able to be seen as the person they want to be known as. If the image we would want to create in other people is shattered then we are at risk of making terrible and desperate decisions. One of the times in a person's life when they are highly likely to feel like they won't be seen the way they want to be seen is during the time when they are still forming the idea of what it means to be seen this way at all: the teenage years.
Teen suicide is one of the darker aspects of our world and to shy away from it is to have a failure of courage on a local level. To look away to satisfy your own uncomfortability is to be okay with the consequences of looking away and we must do a better job of confronting this. We must find a way to talk about what is actually happening in a way that makes sense and gets to the root of the problem


Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Canadians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide