Ukraine aid and U.S. limits

There is a particular white man, always a little sunburned, who leans into the drive-through window like we are old friends and asks what "you people" think about Ukraine. He means Arabs, or Muslims, or Dearborn, which in his head is one zip code of opinion. I think about my feet, because I have been standing since 8. I think about the copay on his blood pressure meds, because that is my job. Then I think, if I tell him the truth, he will hear a foreign agent. The truth is I am tired of being drafted into someone else's moral movie while this city still has kids doubling up in apartments on Warren Avenue.

I am not a pacifist. My family left a place where men with guns made the law. I do not romanticize Russia. I also do not romanticize a blank American check that gets explained to me like I am insufficiently grateful to be here. I am grateful. Gratitude is not a foreign-policy blank.

When the war started I felt what a lot of people felt: horror, a map, a president in a T-shirt, the sense that a line had been crossed in a way even this numb country could see. I sent $40 to a refugee org because the photo of the train station got me. I am not proud that $40 was my peak. I am describing it. Then the months stacked. Then the appropriations became a personality. Then someone in a comment section told me that if I questioned a round of cluster munitions I wanted another Bucha. That person has never picked up a prescription for a grandmother who is rationing Eliquis.

The real point the aid people have, and I will not steal it from them, is that Ukraine did not ask to be a lesson in American fatigue. Kyiv is not a metaphor for my rent. A tank column is not a hospital bill. If we walk away because we got bored, we teach a lesson I do not want taught, especially not to the kinds of regimes that already think American attention is a season. I have relatives who learned that lesson in a different decade, in a different wreck.

Still. Still I work in a pharmacy in a country that can find a billion for a headline and cannot find a way to make insulin less of a scavenger hunt. The both-and is supposed to be available: we can do missiles and medicine. In practice the same politicians who orate about democracy abroad treat my counter like a cost center. Forgive me if I notice the oration.

Dearborn gets used. We are a prop for people who want to say "the Muslims support X." We are not one X. I have neighbors who want Ukraine armed until the last Russian truck dies, because they hate an empire and they know the flavor. I have neighbors who want every dollar home because they think all of this is a club they were never invited to, and they are not entirely wrong about the club. I have neighbors who only want to talk about Gaza, and they are not crazy to notice a difference in how quickly some American hearts move. I notice it too. Noticing is not a conspiracy. It is a pulse.

I don't do the isolationist costume. Isolation is a word for a country that still has bases like a rash. I do a simpler sentence: prioritize. Tell me the hierarchy. Tell me what we are not doing because we are doing this. If the answer is "nothing, we are magic," I will not believe you. I count pills. I know inventory.

NATO, from here, looks like a family business that keeps adding cousins and then acting shocked when the table is crowded. Maybe Ukraine belongs at the table eventually. Maybe the table should have been honest in 2008. I am not a fellow. I am a woman who wants the honesty more than the expansion map. Honesty would sound like: this will be long, it will be ugly, Europe will underpay, Americans will get mean, and the mean will not all be racist, some of it will be a mill town that was already mean because it was already left.

My husband says I am becoming a Republican. He says it to annoy me. I am not. I am becoming a person who hates being emotionally conscripted. The left conscripts with shame. The right conscripts with flags. Shame and flags both work on people who want to belong. I belong to a counter and a Saturday school and a mother who still calls from Amman like I might disappear. That is enough belonging. I do not need a tank to complete me.

If I had to vote the aid tomorrow, I would vote a number with strings: production at home, Europe's percentage in writing, no more theater about a victory that isn't here, and a domestic stack that is not crumbs. Strings make people scream "leverage" as if leverage were a sin. Leverage is how you buy a car. We could try being that vulgar and that serious.

The sunburned man will come through again. He will want a take. I will hand him a bag and a receipt and I will not give him Dearborn. He can read a paper. He can also look at the line behind him, which is always a mix of Yemeni grandfathers and Polish nurses from the hospital and a kid in a Lions hoodie who is going to forget his metformin until I remind him. That line is my foreign policy, which is a joke, except it isn't. A country that cannot see that line will not run an empire well, or a republic, or a war.

I hope Ukraine stays Ukraine. I hope my hope does not have to be a personality. I hope the next bill comes with a paragraph about pharmacies in cities that are tired of being asked to clap. Clapping is not a strategy. Counting is. I am good at counting. I would like Washington to try it without a camera.

At iftar last spring a cousin argued with my uncle about cluster munitions until the soup got cold. My uncle won on volume. My cousin won on facts I couldn't check. I won by doing the dishes. That is not a parable about women. It is a report from a kitchen that contains the whole American fight in miniature, plus rice. I dried the plates and I thought: none of these men will be in the trench, and neither will I, and the least we can do is not lie about the cost.

Cost is the word I will not retire. If that makes me insufficiently moved, come stand for ten hours and then tell me about my heart. My heart is fine. It is my credulity that got thin.