Democracy Fails When Ordinary Life Becomes a War

It is past eleven in Kyiv and I am watching a woman in Florida getting on a bus at six in the morning.

Her name is Germania. She is 25 years old. About two hours earlier, she had finished an overnight shift at a fast food chain. She had gone home, but that morning there had been no time to sleep before leaving again.

She says she cannot wait to get on the bus, because there she can close her eyes.

That morning, the bus is the only place left for her to rest.

I did not go looking for her. The algorithms brought her, and I let them carry me through America.

We usually speak about algorithms with suspicion. Yet sometimes YouTube seems to understand what I need to see, hear and know.

Most of what it brings me is beautiful.

It shows me so many of you supporting Ukraine, so overwhelmingly, and it is hard to describe what that does for a person at night in this city.

It connects me to your country, and it is one reason I have become so interested in everything I can learn about you.

And it is easy from here to think of America as the dreamland. Opportunity, skyscrapers, New York and California, the most advanced economy on Earth…

All of that can hide the people who never entered the chain of prosperity.

Then those same algorithms made my life cross three lives in the United States, and they decided to bring me two documentaries (here and here) that kept me awake until late in the morning.

Larry, 52, works at Disney World. He earns 228 dollars a week, and 149 of them goes to a motel room.

Somebody asks whether he is proud of his name tag. He says yes, and he means it.

I have thought a lot about that little name tag. Larry had managed a large customer service department before. The job disappeared, and eventually his house disappeared too.

Now he worked at one of the most famous places on the planet and went home to a motel room with his family, the only place he can afford to live.

Then there was Terry. He was 42 years old and had been living for two years in another motel with six children.

Before the motel, he had managed sales in the car business. His family had owned a boat, and he remembered playing golf at a country club in another state.

Terry said that when the market collapsed, the illusion of security and stability went with it.

I understood him immediately.

And Germania kept working nights in fast food, mornings serving coffee, three children waiting in another motel room.

She paid about three quarters of what she earned for that room, and she could see her children for four hours a day.

They are never in the headlines.

They are remembered when politicians need their vote, and sometimes not even then, because even their address may be uncertain. Anyway, when your mind is consumed by rent, food, work and where your children will sleep, there is definitely very little space left to be a voter at all.

Before 2022, when Ukraine appeared in your newspapers, it came with one label.

The poorest country in Europe.

You may remember that.

It was arguable, and it was not far from the truth either.

So this is not a competition of suffering.

But I have known what it is to reach the end of the month with almost nothing left. I have worked in fast food too, and I know the arithmetic you do with your eyes in the aisle before the checkout.

You look at the basket, you know how much money remains, and some of it must go back to the shelf.

Watching them, I recognised a part of my own life before the documentaries had even finished.

Our worst fear is the morning our suffering becomes ordinary enough that the looking stops.

Which is what happened to Germania, Larry and Terry.

America is the most visible country on earth, and still, inside all that visibility, lives like these can become almost impossible to see.

I have kept thinking about that contradiction.

Your presidents are known everywhere. Your elections are watched everywhere. We know your billionaires, your companies, your universities and your cities.

And a few miles from Disney World, children were learning that a motel room could be home.

Somewhere else, a father was sleeping in a tent before getting up to look for work.

For a brief moment somebody pointed a camera at them.

Then the camera left.

You write to me about fear for your country, and the fear is correct.

A democracy can start failing its people long before it takes their vote. It begins when a family struggles in plain sight until the struggle becomes ordinary, and eventually they are taught that being overlooked was their own failure.

When I write from Ukraine about what deserves to survive, lives like yours are inside that argument too.

These documentaries were filmed more than a decade ago, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

Germania gave herself six years. Six years until she imagined a house, a better job, her children grown and happy. More than her six years have passed.

So Germania, I hope you made it.

I hope you got the house.

I hope there came a morning when you woke up in your own bed and there was no bus waiting to carry you from one job to another.

Larry, I hope you got out of that motel and you kept the pride you had when you showed that name tag to the camera, because your dignity in that small moment I will remember for a long time.

Terry, you said you would never be safe from losing everything again, and I hope the years proved you wrong.

And Joe, Chelsea, Tom, Amber, Daniel.

I saw you too. Your children, your cars and the tents.

I saw the applications being filled out and the mornings beginning before sunrise, and the people who had lost nearly every form of certainty and still got up the following morning.

You will probably never know that, more than a decade later, somebody in Kyiv watched those old images and wondered what became of you, but I want these words to exist anyway.

I saw you from Ukraine.

And wherever this decade carried each of you, I hope you did not lose hope along the way.

I hope the years were gentler than the days I watched.

Most of all, I hope you kept believing that the life you were fighting for was still possible.

From a country still fighting for its future, I know what it can cost to keep believing in one.

And I understand why you have to protect it.

—Viktor

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