An Ecuatorian woman struck up a conversation with me while I was eating sushi in preparation for my driving lesson. She said she knew I was from Spain even before seeing that I was reading a book on the Spanish Civil War because my appearance and outfit are very Spanish.

I’m glad, of course, because, among white people, the only women more beautiful than the Spanish are the British women.

My Jewish Ukrainian colleague irrupted into my office and told me in a suddenly heavy Ukrainian accent that the events in Ukraine make her feel like her heart has been wrenched out of her chest. The worst part, she says, is seeing how indifferent everybody around her is to this horrible situation. So I promised her I would write about this so that at least my readers know what is happening. These are some highlights from my long conversation with my colleague.

. . . At this point, the reason why people in Ukraine are protesting in the streets has nothing to do with the EU, Russia, or anything external to the country. People are objecting to the new legislation that prohibits peaceful gatherings of protesters. This is the basic democratic right that is being trampled by the President of Ukraine, the convicted rapist Yanukovich. Many people have been jailed for protesting already, so now the goal of their comrades in the streets is to liberate them.

. . . The special forces are beating and torturing peaceful protesters. Their methods include stripping the protesters naked and leaving them in the woods. The weather in Ukraine is far below freezing.

. . . Over a hundred people have been reported missing and nobody knows what happened to them.

. . . The special forces shoot plastic bullets into protesters’ faces, aiming to hit them in the eye. Dozens, maybe hundreds of protesters, have lost their eye-sight but they can’t go to a hospital because there are regular patrols of the hospitals checking for people who are there getting for injuries received at the hands of the police.

. . . A 72-year-old scrawny little man was arrested for attacking a group commandos with “dangerous weapons.” His dangerous weapons consisted of a loaf of bread, a piece of salo, and a roll of toilet paper.

. . . The protesters’ collectively adopted rule is that there will be no alcohol involved in the protests. But the  special forces guys drink like they’ve been paid to do it. Which they probably have. So every morning begins for the protesters with cleaning the public squares where they gather from mountains of empty vodka bottle and pools of vomit left by the defenders of law and order.

. . . Russian media are engaging in a shameful xenophobic propaganda campaign that makes seemingly normal people writhe in the grip of a racist hysteria. From the intensity of their rage, you’d think we were the ones to keep them as our colony for 300+ years, prohibiting their language and destroying their literature and culture. The argument that is put forward in Russia is that Ukrainians are lazy degenerates. If you’ve done any post-colonial studies, you will recognize this argument.

. . . The so-called Western democracies care about nothing but oil. They will tolerate any dictator and allow him to inflict anything he wants on his own and neighboring countries as long as he gives them their fix of this drug.

I’m pretty conservative politically and especially in what concerns the economy but whenever I find myself among a group of colleagues from my university I feel like the most subversive commie pinko radical anybody can be.

For instance, during the book club meeting, I happened to be wearing my ring with Che Guevara’s portrait (because I had been teaching my class on Cuba on that day and wanted to show the ring to my students) and I also ended up saying that the author of the book we are reading is a tenured professor at Harvard which means that she has high personal stakes in proving that the system works. To me, that’s the most boring platitude anybody can say, but in the book club this was like I’d dropped a bomb. People were fascinated with the idea but terrified of it. They started declaiming loudly and insistently that, “What if she has tenure at Harvard, she is still one of us.”

This, of course, awakened the contrarian in me, and things became quite heated.

At the faculty book club that I joined two colleagues started fighting.

“I’m in Education,” one said, “and we are the lowest of the low in academia.”

“Oh no,” the second one retorted. “I’m in Sociology, and we are lower that even you guys.”

“No, no, no,” the Education  person said. “We are so low that we are downright pathetic. You guys are definitely higher than us.”

I didn’t want to be eclipsed, so I decided to participate.

“Well, we in Foreign Languages are also quite low,” I ventured.

The Sociologist  and the Education person glared at me.

“No, Foreign Languages are totally high up there. It’s like you are on the Moon while we are groveling in the dirt.”

“Are we?” I asked, beginning to feel important.

“Oh yes. And, I mean, Spanish? That’s stardom. That’s even higher than English.”

I was beginning to glow with a newly acquired sense of self-importance where another colleague chimed in.

“Well, I’m in Dentistry,” he confessed.

And then we realized that, compared to Dentistry, we were all in the dirt and could rest easy.