Last week, Punch, a seven-month-old macaque monkey from the Ichikawa Zoo in Japan, caught the attention of people around the world. Punch was born prematurely last July and was promptly rejected by his mother. The keeper bought him a rag toy orangutan and the cub immediately bonded with both the keeper and the doll. When they tried to reunite him with other adult monkeys, they rejected him: he was repeatedly filmed dragging and chasing him inside the zoo's enclosure.
The videos showed him wandering around awkwardly on his own with a toy twice his size in his paw, or covering himself with it for protection while being bullied and beaten by older monkeys. The scientists explained that it was not bullying or any abnormal behavior, but that it was about the usual dynamics among these animals, about hierarchy and adaptation. We didn't believe it, it pained us that the weaker one was suffering, as if this is not the case in the world. The whole world cheered for Pancho.
I spent the whole night watching those videos one after the other crying. To me, Punch was the personification of everything that was happening in the world. I don't know what was more shocking to me, Punch who so patiently tries to get closer to others or the society of the powerful who persistently rejects him.
We were all relieved when footage later surfaced of the older orangutan hugging him, and no one even dared to check if it was YOU because we wanted a happy ending.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine started a war that entered its fifth year on February 24, a war that, according to estimates by the Associated Press, has claimed more than half a million lives, turned millions into refugees, while the material damage is hundreds of billions of dollars. We hear every day that it is the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War - and we pretend that this does not mean that it has caused a feeling on the old continent that history is not over and that sovereignty in the 21st century is not guaranteed.
On the occasion and during this war, for the first time in its history, the European Union financed massive military aid to a country at war, and Finland and Sweden joined the NATO alliance. America helped a lot. Some conscientious people in Russia decided not to take part in that war and left their country forever, leaving friends and property behind. Some terrifying documentaries were made that became testaments to the era, Chernov won an Oscar for 20 days in Mariupol.
And so, while children locked up in shelters spent years without fathers, without daylight, fresh air, running after a ball, without school classes, New Year's trees, deprived of all privacy and unprotected from the outpouring of everyone's sadness, anger and fear, some other even bloodier wars began and drew the world's attention away from Ukraine.
Thanks to the Crocodile Center, I was in Ukraine in Uzhhorod on the third anniversary of the war. From the first day of the war, Milena and Vladimir delivered all kinds of aid to Ukraine and organized numerous artistic programs dedicated to the Ukrainian community in Serbia. They are actually like that keeper in the Japanese zoo who gave the baby monkey a doll.
I don't know if I was shivering because of the many hours of waiting at the border or because of the big blue billboard that said "USAID". At that time, we already knew for months that USAID was no longer supporting anyone. While the EU is supposedly thinking about the 20th package of sanctions against Russia, things remain more or less unresolved, more and more people are talking about the war only as a trigger for hyperinflation and the inevitable search for alternative sources of energy, and less and less as a tragedy for real people.
At every step after that border with the billboard, I was pleasantly surprised by their belief in victory. Cities in semi-darkness are illuminated by the optimism of its residents and children. Men have been at the front for years, from the youngest to those who still have a pulse, there are only women in the cities and they take care of everything, not only the family, but companies, agriculture, religion, and the entire society. They run the country, they also run this war from the shadows. Every day they organize humanitarian aid, which they collect at art programs and poetry evenings. Their rapture is completely surreal given the circumstances.
The first editions of some of the contemporary Ukrainian poets are sold for thousands of euros, who are released from the front for one day to read their poetry in public, and then return to the military ranks with the collected money.
Therefore, they do not surrender, whether the world is with them or not, because the Ukrainians defend their territory attacked by a much stronger enemy, abandoned by their "mother" they do not retreat in the face of blows, their strength and faith remind me of Pancho and I hope that they will win, because that is the same happy end that must happen.
Afterwards, they will think about whose money will be used to rebuild those ruined cities, and that is the least important. But who will be able to return the loved ones they lost to those people, who will return the years they spent in cold shelters, which non-governmental organization will deal with the delinquency of minors who spent their formative years without a father figure? Who will help those men when they return from the battlefield to accept the new roles of their wives, who now enjoy a higher degree of authority in the house, who will show them the trust they deserve, how many of these marriages will survive, who will cure their nightmares...?
And then you realize that today in the world, even since that war, there is at least another one that is worse than this one.
All the children in Gaza are that little abandoned Panchi.
Everyone turned away from them - both the European Union and America, because someone said that the war was over.
Many were surprised by Wim Wenders' statement at this year's Berlin Film Festival that films should stay away from politics, while the fact that for the last two decades he has directed only films that seem to have been ordered by a travel agency could be attributed to his "dose of taking a stand". However, it is said that Wenders did not refrain from politics when, twenty years ago, he nationally insulted the technicians who were setting up his exhibition in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, while his wife apologized for his behavior by buying those same technicians burek for breakfast. At the same time, it is known that some other people interrupted the Cannes Festival in 1968 because of the war in Vietnam, and Godard even forbade his wife to go to the sea, because how can someone lie on the beach while people are dying somewhere...
At an amateur league soccer match in Istanbul, the goalkeeper hit the ball hard from the penalty area. That ball hit a seagull in flight, which just then flew over the field, and it fell to the ground and showed no signs of life. The captain of one of the teams, Gani Catan (Catan), immediately ran to the injured bird and tried to resuscitate it with light pressure on the chest, after which the seagull began to show signs of life again. Full hearts to the players of both teams, (although Katan's team lost) applause and tears from the stands.
What was the probability of this happy ending?!
Why haven't we come to terms with the fact that such is his fate, that the seagull must meet such a death? How do we know how to massage the heart of a seagull, but it is so difficult for us to warm a human heart? Didn't Barack Obama, when he was US president, have to apologize for killing a fly in a TV interview? How do we understand that Panchi needs a friend, but all we care about is where the gas is coming from and who is going to produce our next Hollywood spectacle? Why is empathy selective?
No answer. Well, that's why we cried watching the videos about little Panchi.
