The summer was long in Ukraine, but now it’s over. We spent the last warm day of the fall in Kramatorsk, where red-and-gold leaves gild the trees and Russians are creeping closer. Every time I go, more buildings lie in rubble. This time, it’s an apartment block just around the corner from the one where I’m staying, and a hotel close to the edge of town where high schoolers used to hold their proms, and Russians targeted a Reuters team in August with an Iskander ballistic missile.
That strike almost killed a longtime friend, photojournalist Tom Peter, who was lucky to escape with his life; one of his colleagues did not. After the strike, Russian channels cheered it as an attack on “NATO advisors.” They were nothing of the sort. They were the only people staying at the hotel, which had been closed to all but a select group of media since the start of the full-scale invasion; they were just journalists, doing their jobs. But on pro-Russian channels, any foreigner here is, by default, a “mercenary” or a “NATO advisor.”
The trip was short, which suited me. I feel a little more on-edge in Kramatorsk now than before. The apartment where we stayed is a top-floor suite. I lay awake at night staring at the ceiling, suddenly aware that it’s little more than a paper-thin concrete membrane, offering no protection. We had a few meetings, and went back to Kyiv.
I wish I had never complained about the heat in the summer. Then we had warmth, but no power. Now we have power, but no warmth. In Ukraine, heating season is an official event; the heat comes on when local governments permit. I’m told that in the capital, that usually begins around Oct. 15. This year it’s still gone, a worrisome sign about the state of the country’s war-battered electrical grid.
Some apartments have separate electric heaters. Mine does not. The temperature is sinking lower. Before I left Canada in January 2023, my brother gifted me a nice pair of thermal wool under-layers, and a friend bought me a pair of her favourite thermal socks. I wear them all day, with a sweatshirt overtop, and still all day I huddle in bed and shiver. My fingers turn to ice as I type at my computer. Every morning, I wake up so cold that my body rebels at the brain’s order to leave the safety of the blankets.
And every night, flocks of Shahed attack drones whine overhead.
It feels like purgatory, right now. A country holds its breath, and waits. Everyone in the world holds their breath and waits, because the Americans are doing that thing. You know, that thing they do that gives the rest of us a heart attack every four years.
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In November 2016, just hours after it became clear that Donald Trump had won the election, I woke up early, threw my suitcase into the backseat of my car, and made a hasty escape from Fargo. It’s hard to explain, but I wanted nothing more than to get out of the United States. Nothing was different than the night before: folks were out shopping at Target, running their errands, normal life was still going on.
Yet I felt profoundly uncomfortable just being in the United States. Until that night, I’d always thought I at least understood the Americans: my own parents and siblings are U.S. citizens, and I should have been one too (long story). I’d spent plenty of time there, and paid more attention to their politics than Canada’s.
So when I woke up that morning in Fargo, to a Donald Trump president-elect, it felt profoundly dislocating. I simply didn’t understand how they could have chosen a man who, to my eye, was so profoundly unfit for the gig. I didn’t want to stick around even a second longer than I had to. I was, to be blunt, just weirded out, and all I wanted was to get back home to Canada and figure it all out.
I reached the crossing into Manitoba well before noon. The Canadian border guard, a woman, took my passport with the typical rigid disinterest, and asked the typical rote questions.
Where do you live? Winnipeg.
How long were you in the United States? Five days.
What were you doing there?
Here, I sort of stuttered. I was still mentally processing what had happened, so for some reason my words blurted out in an upward-rising tone.
“I’m uh, a journalist? And I was there? To uh, cover the election?”
The border guard looked up, and we locked eyes. She choked back a laugh, swallowing it down so as not to break her composure. We exchanged a wordless look; it was a very surreal moment, but we understood each other completely.
“Ohhh,” she said, slowly. “And how… how was that?”
This time, it was me who started laughing.
“Let’s just say it’s good to be back,” I said.
The guard chuckled, and handed my passport back with a flourish.
“Welcome home,” she said.
I tell that story often, because it’s kind of funny. It was also, I think, a perfect snapshot of the collective “what the hell” moment that a lot of us shared after Trump’s win. The issue, I think, wasn’t that anything actually changed in that moment; it was that it put an unavoidable spotlight on just how wide the breach in our society had grown, while we hadn’t really been looking.
Here’s what I mean. Generally, I’m a believer that people everywhere are more or less the same, with the same variations. Travel has taught me that; being a journalist has taught me that too. Of course, culture shapes us in many ways, but human beings are just really not all that different. Most of us think of ourselves as being decent people. Most of us just want to live our lives and make our communities good places to be.
Of course, there are always differences of opinion on how that sort of life ought best to be secured. I don’t necessarily agree with many traditional conservative positions about, for instances, taxation; but I can understand why someone would come to see that as the right path forward. People can have roughly similar values and still come to very different ideas about how to enact them.
With Trump and everything around him, though, the calculation is so vastly different. Myself, and someone who would vote for Trump: all I can conclude is that we occupy fundamentally different worlds. When I read pro-Trump posts on social media, I have no idea where to begin to respond, because the baseline perception of reality they are operating from is so different than mine.
This all leads to a sort of unbridgeable gap. Social media algorithms pushing rage-bait over sober news just makes it worse: click on one topic of interest, and the algorithms will deluge you with content that is increasingly extreme. You see the end result when some people believe the war in Ukraine doesn’t exist, or else that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the right thing to do.
I have no idea how to heal that breach. I don’t have a clue. I don’t think I’m alone in this either. Recently, an American columnist wrote a bit on Twitter about how fully pointless the idea of writing an endorsement column is: so what, you’re going to list all the reasons not to vote for Trump? They’re all old news, all right in the open. The issue is that some people just see those things in a way you can’t even comprehend.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so depressing, if global geopolitics didn’t hinge so much on what the Americans do. But it does. In Ukraine, there’s an immense sense of dread about this election: their fate hinges on it. But it isn’t just Ukraine. It’s been obvious in the last few weeks that, all over the world, a lot of powers are waiting to see what happens on Tuesday, because that will determine how much leeway they have to do what they want to do. It probably isn’t a good thing that literally billions of lives so turn on the political dramas, and choices, of a comparative few.
I saw a Tweet today, describing the time between now and Wednesday morning as being the equivalent of being in an airport lounge. In other words: we’re all here in transit. “No one will judge you for having a beer at 10 a.m.”
Good luck to all of us. See you on the other side, and we’ll figure it out then.
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In case you missed it: my long feature about the legacy of Chornobyl, and a visit to its surrounding Exclusion Zone, was in the Free Press last weekend. It was a total bucket-list experience for me to visit the Zone; if you’re as fascinated by it as I am, make sure to check out The Chornobyl Family on YouTube. Oleksandr and Michaela have such a thoughtful view on Chornobyl, as a place and an event; and their videos have a way of making you incredibly interested in Soviet-era technology.
There’s a lot going on right now — I’ll be doing a lot of travel in the next couple of weeks for at least two more long Free Press features. One of them in particular has a really unique Manitoba link. Can’t wait.