Remember the character Howard Beale from the movie Network? Sure you do..”I’m as Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore”. Ah ha! Now you remember.

Howard was losing his job as a newscaster and had a little – well, not so little – drinking problem. So those two facts combined to turn him into a raving maniac who became an instant icon with angry people. That description start to sound familiar? Yeah. We’ve seen this character before.

But here’s the thing: Howard wasn’t the head of a country, and he didn’t declare war and start blowing up things that didn’t belong to him. And that’s what I woke up at 3:16 am this morning confused about. How is it that the world is standing by while one man – yes, one man! One man is allowed to send other men and war machines to systematically blow up buildings and people in a country totally separate from his? Is Russia Putin’s country? Apparently it is.

I was sickened to watch Sergei Lavrov on the news, forced to say bald faced lies that he knew were lies and the Ukrainians he was talking to knew were lies – all at the behest of this one man. Sergei has no credibility now after that. Erik the Elder said it best: Putin pushed all his chips into the middle of the table. He’s going for broke.

And in the process, two countries at minimum will be broke and broken. How is it the rest of the world stands aside and lets this happen? Congress voting to give money to buy arms for the Ukrainians is a day late and several dollars short. It appears that, even if Ukraine survives, it is as destroyed as Aleppo, Syria. Seen pictures of that hell hole lately?

While all this is going on, columnists write, politicians and former generals talk and still the people of Ukraine die. Why is this OK? Why can’t it be stopped? Why do innocent people have to be thrown into mass graves – right there on television – and it’s just okay? Because the rest of the world is saying, “Well, as long as it doesn’t come to MY neighborhood, it’s ok. I’m just one person. There’s nothing I can do to stop it, so I’ll just change the channel and watch something else. I don’t want to watch those “disturbing images” the news anchor always warns us about before the dead children are shown at a discrete distance. Oh, by all means, let’s keep a discrete distance. Don’t want to see the face of an 8 year old killed by Vladimir Putin.

So I’m as Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore. But then I stop and think back to an earlier time. I think back to watching tanks crossing a desert, virtually unstopped when a much larger country attacked a much smaller country. The attack was justified on the basis of a lie – something about the ruler of that much smaller country having something called WMDs? I think back to an earlier time when that same bigger country used precision bombing to attack a much smaller country because that much smaller country was guilty of ethnic cleansing within its borders. Neither of these actions justify what Putin is doing. But it does provide me some insight into a couple of facts. First: how you feel about these acts depends on which side you’re on. And the other is: the world will always stand by and let these things happen. Why? A cynic would say because money can be made from it. A psychologist would talk about men possessed by grievance issues: Hitler and Putin come to mind. But to that dead eight year old, does any of that matter? She’s still not going to have a life. I have an eight year old granddaughter. If that happened to her, I’d see this the same way the Ukrainians now do.

This has to stop before any more eight year olds are killed. NATO has to intervene and push back on this bully. Yes, violence to stop violence. We can’t stand behind eight year olds and wait until the Russians run out of ammo. Do it now. Otherwise, eight year olds in Ukraine will be joined by eight year olds in Russia, suffering because of sanctions and the destruction of the country’s currency. This is wrong. We’re adults. We’re supposed to protect children.

Nelson Mandela said, There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. That says it all. It’s time, gentlemen. Start your engines.