Off The Radar Screen

Michael Harris writes that The West is forgetting about Ukraine. It's off our radar screens -- a victim of our short attention spans. Consider what has happened in the United States -- the chief ally of the Ukrainians:

Nearly four months into the war, Ukraine no longer routinely leads the nightly news. On the crowded clothesline of the U.S. media, other stories have captured the public’s attention.

Americans now aim their outrage at gasoline prices, over five bucks a gallon to see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet.

Uvalde, Texas, showed that Ukraine doesn’t have the monopoly on atrocities, as 19 fourth graders gunned down along with two teachers in a school. 

Then there is the national melodrama playing out on television screens across the country, as congressional investigators lay bare just how ruthlessly the Trump White House tried to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election. It’s sedition by any other name, and judging by the recent testimony of White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, an unhinged president.

And now the U.S. Supreme Court with Conservative judges put there by Trump has plunged the country into chaos by overturning Rowe vs. Wade, stripping millions of American women of their legal right to a safe and accessible abortion.

Yes, European leaders like Boris Johnson and Olaf Scholz occasionally make the trip to Kyiv for the obligatory photo op with him.  And yes, NATO and the G-7 still have the rhetoric right.

But the political winds are shifting. Some reports have characterized that change as “fatigue” with the war in certain quarters. Some people want the war to end, raising the question; is it Ukraine they are thinking about, or the prospect of a European winter without Russian gas and oil?

There is talk in the American military of withdrawing from Ukraine:

There have already been reports that some members of the military think it is highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever be able to recover territory lost to the Russians in the Donbas. Together with the view that the war must end, it is not hard to imagine that the day may soon come when President Zelensky will be pressured to agree to a peace that would cede Ukrainian territory to the Russian invaders.

When I taught school, ADD -- Attention Deficit Disorder -- was deemed a "Learning Disability." Students with ADD could not concentrate long enough to learn something. Now ADD is no longer an individual issue. It's a societal issue.

It seems we can no longer focus on a problem long enough to fix it.

Image: The Hill Times