Can a Single Conversation Shake the World?
My Spanish teacher asked me something the other day that I haven't been able to shake. Is it true, she said, that Europe doesn't want Russians anymore?
Something stirred inside me. A rush of thoughts, tangled and contradictory, all arriving at once.
She's not wrong. Many European countries have, in one way or another, closed their doors to Russian citizens. It's a kind of collective embargo — one society imposing informal sanctions on another that appears, at least from the outside, to be passively endorsing a war waged against a neighbor who did nothing to deserve it. And yet, the moment you say that out loud, you bump into an uncomfortable truth: collective punishment is still punishment. What exactly has the individual Russian done — the one quietly packing a suitcase, hoping to get out — to deserve being turned away?
It's a question that doesn't have a clean answer.
And here's where my mind did something strange: it drifted to a completely different group of people. The migrants who've arrived from across the Middle East into Germany, France, Belgium — seeking, as they often say, a better life. Only they don't always come intending to become German or French. They carry their whole world with them: their customs, their clothes, their sense of identity. In some cases, deeply troubling practices follow too. Female genital mutilation, for instance, does occur in European countries — it's not a hypothetical — and that can't be glossed over. But here's the thing: there is no war driving the comparison. The situations aren't equivalent. And yet they rhyme in a way that feels worth examining.
So back to Russia.
Russia — and I find myself speaking about it as though it were a single person, a woman, cold and deliberate — launched an attack on what was, in any honest reading, an innocent neighbor. What is happening in Ukraine right now will take generations to fully understand, just as it took decades for the full horror of World War II's crimes to be documented, named, and reckoned with. Those who have already read survivor accounts from Ukraine know: what's come out so far is only the beginning. What eventually surfaces will stop future generations cold.
And yet — Russia's streets, when filmed, show citizens who either speak adoringly of President Putin or reach for familiar justifications: Ukraine is run by Nazis, the West is the aggressor, the operation is necessary. These are the slogans. The same architecture of language that ordinary Germans once used while their government committed atrocities next door.
Then I thought of Metro 2033 — Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel, though for a moment the name escaped me. In it, the great enemy is a species of dark mutants climbing down to the human-inhabited tunnels of the Moscow metro. Born from humanity's own catastrophic mistakes after a nuclear war, these creatures are adapted, evolved — and, it turns out, they're trying to reach out. They want connection. Understanding. And there's one scene, brief and aching, where it almost happens. Where a single human almost sees through their eyes. Almost.
It's that "almost" that stayed with me.
Because maybe — and I'm aware this sounds counterintuitive — the answer to the question my teacher posed isn't to close the door on Russians, but to fling it open wider. Invite them. Not reluctantly, but enthusiastically. Let them see the world through our eyes, and let us, genuinely, try to see through theirs.
I've thought for a while that the only real solution to the immigration anxieties gripping Europe and the United States alike isn't stricter borders — it's deeper integration. Mixing. The kind of proximity that makes someone else's pain feel closer to your own. When understanding isn't something you encounter on a screen, but something you reach across a table for, things shift. Slowly. Imperfectly. But they shift.
Maybe that's how worlds actually shake — not from the outside, but from within, one almost-moment at a time.