I have all the time in the world to tinker with this. None of the intended addressees have returned my calls or letters for years. Nor will they this time, I am sure.
It gives me a sense of power. I have given them no reason other than leaving my ex-wife in 2006 - quickly, quietly and cleanly - and holding opinions they don’t like but will not counter.
Anyhow, here is a draft letter to about twenty Americans of the liberal persuasion explaining my life in Kyiv. I chose today to post it because a new acquaintance, Lionel, asked about life in Kyiv. Lionel, this is for you.
Graham
A letter from another planet.
I live in a different world from you. Half a world away, living the frugal but satisfying existence of a man two generations younger.
While many of you appear studiously uncurious about our world, people in my world remain curious about yours. Since I'm writing from mine, I will express my curiosity. I begin with a catalog of the vast differences between your life and mine.
Fewer resources
In our world we use fewer natural resources. Without beating our chest about it, we manage a significantly smaller carbon footprint than any of you. I figure about five tons per year to your fifteen.
In 2008 I got rid of the last of the three cars that came my way out of the divorce. I have been bicycling and taking public transit in Kyiv.
Oksana and I built a simple 2400 ft.² five-bedroom house and moved in in 2013. Property taxes are almost nil. Utilities run about $2000 a year; maintenance another $3000.
Notes on transportation
Although Ukrainians think otherwise, I consider them to be polite drivers. I have not come close to having an accident in the 16 years I have been bicycling here. Except when there is snow on the ground I usually shop by bicycle, 40 pounds of groceries between the luggage rack in my backpack.
Ukrainians are also very courteous on public transportation. It is a homogeneous, middle-class ridership. They love children. The assumption is that I am on an outing with my adorable grandchildren. They go out of their way to offer us a seat on the Metro. They would as well on buses and tramways except that they are seldom crowded.
Senior citizens ride the buses and tramways for free. They look at my face and never ask for a fare. The Metro costs 30¢.
Notes on Recreation
The Desno River, which flows South from Russia into the Dnipro (Dnieper) at Kyiv, is neither navigable nor dammed. The water is clean and eminently swimmable, which we love to do this time a year. There are a number of lakes, the remnants of old meanders of the river, which offer the additional advantage of not having to be shared with jet skis.
Kyiv has a number of wonderful parks. The fact that there is nobody here except Ukrainians means that there is a lot of civic pride, a sense of oneness. The upshot is that notoby would think of vandalizing the playground equipment. There is not much graffiti. Victory Park, our favorite, has a couple of playgrounds that are so crowded that no matter how careful you invariably lose sight of your kids as they wander around enjoying the fantastic equipment. Since just about everybody else is in the same situation, we don't worry about it. The kids themselves make spontaneous friendships, though because we don't live close, they do not blossom into anything.
Notes on the war
The Russians pounded Kyiv with rockets all last winter, trying to knock out our power. This spring they have stepped it up simply as a matter of terrorizing the population. They don't even pretend to be shooting at military targets. This morning I Oksana told me that one of the Iranian drones buzzed low, close to our house last night. Although I had heard distant explosions, I missed that one.
The Kiev Post reckons that the Russians blew about $1.7 billion worth of rocketry in May. They should be close to the bottom of the barrel, although we have not seen the attacks slack off. The greatest danger is on the upper floors of high-rise apartments, where perhaps 10 or 15 people died in the month of May. Not an extraordinary number – more than 2,000 die naturally every month out of our population of 35 million – but enough to cause concern.
I reassure Oksana that our house is more than a mile from any factories, offices, or even high-rise apartments. We don't have any through roads. We are far from anything military. I cover a lot of ground on the side of the river with my bicycle, and I have yet to see anything damaged by rockets.
Sweet are the uses of adversity. Although I certainly want the war to end, I cannot help but note that it has brought a few blessings.
· It is quiet without airplanes overhead.
· Unwanted immigrants have left.
· Government is not in a position to force things like central bank digital currencies, vaccinations, restrictions on gas appliances, elimination of cattle herds on us. They can't afford to irk people when they need 100% support of the war.
· The dollar exchange rate has been favorable.
Notes on government
Ukrainians don't trust government. It's a centuries old attitude carried over from the czars and the Soviets. The Russian proverb that the severity of the laws is matched only by the laxity of their enforcement applies here as well.
Childhood vaccinations are a good case in point. The doctors in the polyclinic will remind us that the kids are not vaccinated, but nobody forces you. They should be vaccinated to go to school, but it is not enforced.
I am familiar with Ukrainian textbooks from having homeschooled Eddie and taught in his small private school couple of years ago. While they do encourage Ukrainian patriotism, they do not harp on the themes of global warming, sexual flexibility, or the evil white man.
Even more significant, schools are not afraid to grade children honestly. Our minorities aren't going to raise a fuss. The Jews never suffer from being graded on a curve. Muslims from the Stans seem quite capable of keeping up with Ukrainians, and the Gypsies don't care about education in the first place. In any case, ethnic Ukrainians are by far the dominant element of every school population, enough that they don't have to worry about the others.
Language has been an issue ever since I got here. The question of Russian versus Ukrainian has been settled decisively by Mr. Putin's invasion. The above-mentioned need for unity has led the government to abandon any thoughts of requiring Ukrainian instead of Romanian, Hungarian and Polish in schools in those border communities.
Notes on Covid
In the early days of the disease, the developed world was happy to let Ukraine languish without vaccines as it protected itself. Ukraine was too poor to afford the exorbitant prices being charged.
We were subjected to the stuff that didn't require cash - school closures, lockdowns, social distancing, masking and all that nonsense. Enough to give us a taste of the agenda being pushed on us. The stoic Ukrainians took it in stride but were never too serious about it. I wore my mask on my chin and nobody ever said anything.
In 2020 Eddie was following a dual course, attending a couple of classes at the Sunflower School and homeschooling with me for the rest. Although Sunflower kept operating as best it could, they still had to go to Zoom for a couple of months. We got a sense of how well that worked. Or didn't.
The supermarkets required masks, but the community markets, farmers markets or whatever you want to call them did not. Since that's where I do most of my shopping, it didn't affect me. I kept a tattered old mask in my pocket for when I needed the masquerade.
Ukrainians are individualistic. Even now, three years after, you see maybe one person a day wearing a mask. We don't laugh at them, and they don't try to force them on us.
By the time vaccines became available here, skepticism had raised its head there. The urgency with which the United States and Western European governments pushed their populations into a panic mode struck me as fishy. By the time the movie Plandemic came out in March 2020, I was primed. When they started demonizing hydroxychloroquine, which all of us had taken for four years in Vietnam to prevent malaria, I knew it was a con.
Ukraine is backward enough that you can buy hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin over the counter. I have been doing it for these three years. None of us have ever been diagnosed with Covid. Grandma had the case of the flu which might have been had she seen a doctor.
Notes on Medicine
Ukraine's socialized medicine works at least as well as that in Western Europe. They are not dogmatic about it. The government clinics allow their underpaid doctors to moonlight in private clinics, where you get pretty good care at a very reasonable price.
Ukraine subscribes fully to the Western allopathic notions of medicine: drugs and surgery. Preventative medicine, exercise and the like, are certainly not emphasized. I have been to doctors for my lower back, my heart, and my stomach. Each time they prescribed five medicines and sent me home without any lifestyle recommendations. Every time I researched all five medicines and concluded that the downsides were unacceptable. A book entitled "Treat Your Own Back" solved that problem. Giving up drinking solved the stomach problem. I have simply ignored my arrhythmia for 10 years as I kept to my regime of stationary bicycling.
Dental care here is good and cheap. Oksana had the full treatment of orthodontia and cosmetic dentistry. She no longer has problems chewing and has a stunning smile to boot. This is a center for fertility treatments and surrogate motherhood. I understand there are other spheres, such as joint replacements, in which Ukraine has a significant advantage in price.
Our three children have had one vaccination among them, MMR. Given what I have read about vaccines since the Covid crisis I would not have done even that. I did make sure that Eddie got the shot when he was well past the age at which he might have developed autism. The kids have not gotten childhood diseases. I suspect that other kids being vaccinated has something to do with it. My reading leads me to believe that they would be better off catching bugs such as chickenpox, measles, and mumps while they are young, but I'll accept however it works out. I have written on my website about how my grown children have turned out, and my opinion as to how vaccines may have affected them.
Education
In addition to being a parent, I was a substitute teacher during my first three years here and a classroom teacher in Eddie's school.
My first note is how normal the kids are. Little boys act like little boys, little girls act like little girls. As my first family was growing up, I noticed that some of their classmates and playmates seemed a bit odd. It didn't surprise me at all when Jason Cook ran away to New York with a male lover while he was in high school. There are others such as the Fenwick kid I can only wonder about. Though some of the many kids I have seen here will turn out to be gay, I certainly could not identify them. It is simply not a major part of the culture.
Eleven-year-old Eddie has never had or discussed sex education. I quite openly tell him about my experience growing up around kids in the San Francisco area who turned out to be gay, and of my many gay business associates. When I talk about Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools pushing a gender dysphoria agenda, I am describing a world he cannot conceive.
I am open about our drug use in the 1960s. I know from 20 and 30 something-year-old friends that there is some here in Ukraine, but I certainly don't see it. I don't think my children do either. My message for Eddie is that drugs are a waste of your time and can be a waste of your life. He should have better things to do. Nothing valuable will come from hanging around with kids to use them, so just avoid them.
University education in Ukraine is very inexpensive. In my opinion learning another language – Ukrainian is difficult – is a small price to pay for studying in a place that is not infused in cultural Marxism. The instructors may are primarily interested in imparting subject matter knowledge to their students.
A college student is learning about the world just as much as amassing information that will be useful in the workplace. Learning a second language is a beneficial experience. Studying in a different cultural environment is broadening. More important to me, studying alongside people who are confident in their gender orientation and are well disposed to marriage is a decided plus.
Ukraine has strong information technology and agriculture sectors. A student graduating in those fields will be able to enter at the ground level of the postwar reconstruction here in Ukraine. A man in such a position will be an attractive marriage partner in a country full of attractive and marriageable woman. Not a bad bet.
Raising children
Dr. Spock never visited Ukraine. I am open with my kids. We hug a lot, and I tell them how much I love them. We spend a lot of time together. On the other hand, when they need to be yelled at or get a spanking, they get it. We ask them to help around the house, not as much as we should but more than most.
Children in Ukraine are not hyper sexualized. They dress like kids. The boys are not scared of the girls, and the girls seem to appreciate the guys. Walking down the street you do sometimes see young adults with quite revealing clothing. I'm happy to say that what is revealed is usually quite appealing, even when a bit more modesty might be in order.
American culture has fragmented into a huge number of ethnic cultures, none of which see people of my ethnicity in a favorable light. I am unabashedly raising my children to give me grandchildren raised in the Ukrainian culture.
Victimhood
Ukrainians have stronger and more recent claims on victimhood than any minority group in the United States. Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, and especially Russians lorded over us for centuries. The Soviets killed 6 million of us in the Holodomor and another several million as their favored cannon fodder fighting the Germans.
Conversely, no people on earth are in a position to demand reparations from us. Ukraine never colonized anything. Ukrainians were the slaves, not the slaveholders.
Talk about getting reparations from the Russians makes no sense for several reasons. First, the Russians won't have the money. This war has been destructive for their economy as well. Second, every reparation scheme is fraught with corruption. It is a trough of money for the greedy, seldom benefiting the real victims. A look at German reparations to the Jews is illustrative.
Lastly, and most significantly, most Ukrainians simply want to be left to succeed on our own. We are confident in our own intelligence and industry. Whatever reparations scheme might be devised would have to be crafted with the agreement of the World Economic Forum, George Soros, Bill Gates, and the plethora of other such vultures. We are better off without them.
What the world can do is what it did for Italy, Japan, and Germany. Help Ukraine and Russia to establish workable government institutions that are fair to their populations. The post WWII setups worked well for several decades until they were corrupted and co-opted by multinational organizations such as the European Union. Human nature being what it is, it will not be possible to structure institutions that will last forever. However, if the best effort produces something that will allow my children and grandchildren to prosper, we can let the future take care of itself.
My questions about you
If we could have a conversation, I would love to ask you how your children turned out. Do you have grandchildren? Do you care? How are your grandchildren being educated? Where will they attend university? What will they do for jobs? Will they marry?
How do you feel about legalized marijuana? What about all of the other drugs that are widely tolerated if not legal?
Do you have the freedom to make your own medical decisions with regard to pharmaceuticals and vaccines? Is your medical care affordable?
Can you live on your present income? Do you project being able to live on your pension?
How have you come through the Covid episode – the disease itself, the regime of preventative measures, and the vaccines?
How do you feel about transgenders? About the public schools' assumption that they, not parents, should teach children about sex? About gender change surgery for minor children?
What you think about reparations for Black citizens? About big city district attorneys' refusal to prosecute misdemeanors? About urban decay in general?
What do you think about elements of the green energy program – windmills, solar panels, electric cars, 15 minutes cities and so on? About the pros and cons of 5G wireless?
What do you think brought about Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Do you consider that there is a depopulation agenda foot? If so, is it a good thing?
Conclusion
I know that many of you will disagree with my opinions. They are not uninformed. Amazon carries close to 500 of my reviews of books on these topics. There is an index to them on my Substack. I frequently post videos of my views on YouTube and Rumble.
I believe in science rather than scientism. Science is always open to question. I certainly welcome any questions you may have about what I've written here. I will probably answer with a brief synopsis of what I believe and point you to original sources on which I base my opinion.
Scientism, on the other hand, treats science as religion and favored scientific pronouncements as dogma. I don't accept dogmas, especially about climate change, human sexuality, human diversity, and vaccinations. If you disagree with me, we can have a dialogue.
If you are embarrassed to acknowledge my existence, but are nonetheless curious about my life, you can follow me at grahamseibert.substack.com. My take on my former existence, which is surely at odds with what you hear from my former family, is on my website at grahamseibert.com.
My final observation is that almost all of you to whom it is addressed will not respond. You will never tell me why, so let me guess. Women are the virtuous sex - you cannot forgive me for having left my wife. You don't want to acknowledge, much less answer, the questions I raise above. Lastly, you would hate to concede that a guy with beliefs that run entirely counter to yours appears to be successful. Reason enough to ignore me. I hope you don't.
Graham
The science vs. scientism discussion starting to get traction. Keep pushing. Might wake a few more people up.
Thank you, Graham. I appreciate your candid description of life in Kiev. Accepting your invitation to swap stories... pretty must total agreement with your outlook. I live in the central northern coast of Australia in the monsoonal tropical zone of Arnhem Land, which is peopled by 4000 mainstream Australians and 10,000 Aborigines who retain their 9 local languages, law, and ceremonies. Most of my family is Aboriginal and we speak a see-saw mix of English and two local languages. Because I resist the NWO diktats, the jabs, and the intrusion of 8 US military installations, which includes a Raytheon missile launching platform just up the road from where I write, there is a certain tension in the air. There is also the expectation of reprisal or pre-emptive missile strikes by China sometime in the next twelve months, so there is an element of urgency to my preparations and writings (books, substack, and websites). My relationship with local people goes back 52 years, so it is natural that I gravitate towards a wilderness homeland whereupon I can withdraw when the next NWO onslaught commences. I have my own fresh water, solar power, and will soon establish gardens to supply nearby tribes. Some Aborigines are considering a declaration of national sovereignty as an escape route from globalisation and marxist intrusions. We have a viable economy prepared for this eventuality, should we still be alive. Ergo, a Chinese strike on the Ratheon missiles would vaporise the solid fuel and warheads sending a chlorine and heavy metal cloud across Arnhem Land. Good luck with Ukraine and a Hi to Eddie.