Crazy Year

I remember waking up for my stats class back on February 24, 2022. It was a morning class, and the lecture started with the professor announcing that Russia had invaded Ukraine for the second time. Although the lecture just carried on afterwards, it felt like a dramatic shift in how I view the world.

It made me realize that, unfortunately, war isn’t a thing of the past. Now, I understand that there have been conflicts throughout the 21st century, but the second invasion of Ukraine felt different due to how close it was to home (Poland).

It’s been three years since the start, and the fighting continues. I’m thankful that both of the countries I’m a citizen of have provided Ukraine with extreme amounts of support as they fight for their sovereignty—something that Poland managed to gain themselves back in 1989 after communism fell.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that we’ve had a sharp incline in crazy things happening around the world since. For instance, the current President of the United States threatening to annex one of the countries I’m a citizen of. If you were to tell me that Canada’s sovereignty was going to be called into question by the sitting U.S. President, I wouldn’t have believed you one bit.

I think the general point I’m trying to make is that I believed a lot of the craziness that occurred in the world was in the past—that events like World War II would serve as a reminder and a deterrent for future generations. Now, we aren’t at any level similar to World War II, but the direction the world is heading isn’t a positive one.

This blog post makes me sound like an extreme doomer, but it’s worth mentioning that although things got crazy in just a few years, they can also correct themselves in a few years as well.