Syndicated columnist Marc Dion: Watching Ukraine as a 'cat in the window'

Writing columns about Ukraine makes me feel inferior to the people in the vests that say "PRESS" on the front. They're the reporters living and dying the story. I'm an ornamental jerk whose work appears way inside the paper, so no one will make a mistake and think it's news.

I'm a cat in the window.

I say that because I play a senseless game with myself when I drive to work or the grocery store or on any errand.

The game is called "Members of Cat Nation Sitting in Windows," and it is what it says it is.

Driving around, I keep a rolling eye out for house cats sitting in the windows of the houses I pass. I'm lucky if I see two a day. It's largely a matter of timing. There's no way to cheat.

It's a good game because you don't need any special equipment, there's no competition and, since no one plays it professionally, I don't have to feel inferior to the stars of the game.

Sometimes, at the end of the day, I give my wife the highlights of that day's game.

"I saw a member of Cat Nation sitting in a window on Lisle Street," I tell her. "He was a fat, stripe-y cat, and he was sleeping on the windowsill."

And then I started seeing those pictures of frightened Ukrainians walking down the street with a terrified cat clinging to their left shoulder, claws dug in, eyes wide with fear, ears flat back. Behind the Ukrainian and his cat, an apartment building burns like a torch.

My wife, Deborah, and I have two cats. I sometimes write about them when I'm feeling playful because a columnist who is serious or outraged all the time is faking it some of the time.

Cats will fight each other, mostly when they can't find a way to escape, but unlike human beings, they have discovered that the only real purpose of life is quiet and comfort.

Our cats never leave the house unless they have to go to the vet, when they are wrestled into a carrier where they howl and hiss and pee on themselves. When they come home, they eat a little something, they lick themselves from nose tip to tail, and they go to sleep.

They got toddlers and pregnant women dying in the Ukraine, old ladies made legless, dogs eating corpses in the streets.

And it's not new. You think no civilians died when Sherman burned Atlanta? You think Hannibal's army never killed a child? The Nazis bombed London. The Allies turned Dresden into a flaming coffin. America incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People became charcoal outlines burned into the sidewalk. The Americans killed tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of Iraq. Children left little kid shoes and dolls behind at Bergen-Belsen.

There's a medal on the soldier's chest. There's a gold braid on the general's cap. There's a memorial in the park and a flag and white gloves and volleys fired into the cemetery air and dogs eating dead people in the middle of the street.

It's the old tune of glory that chokes with tears on the last verse.

The members of Cat Nation worship a fat, full belly and cleanliness and a warm place to sleep, and they watch from their windows as the Big People do it all over again, the way they're always doing it somewhere, feeding their pride, feeding the dogs in the street.

And nothing is clean, and nothing is safe, and you're hungry.

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