Our View: Pay attention to Ukraine crisis

Once again, protests and political dissent roil a foreign country. This time, the turmoil is in Ukraine, and the tense situation forces us to pay attention, even as we scramble to educate ourselves on Ukraine's history, its political leanings and whether we should take a stand personally or as a nation.

Violent clashes between ethnic groups and fighting between military troops and rebels can seem far removed from our universe. Then we witness the human suffering that ensues and get drawn into the political debate at home about how the U.S. should respond.

But it's hard to form opinions if you don't dig into the context of the crisis. We are fortunate to have a free press to help citizens do just that. Last week, the Newspaper Association of America celebrated Newspaper in Education week, as a reminder that journalism, whether delivered to you in print or on an electronic device, is the first rough draft of history. We are proud that our NIE program puts newspapers in the classrooms of Erie students so they can follow history as it unfolds in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The events in Ukraine have captured our attention for many reasons -- protesters have been killed or wounded; the speculation that this is a revival of the Cold War; the claims by critics that President Barack Obama's foreign policy is to blame for the crisis.

If there is one lesson we can draw from the situation, it is that Americans should pay more attention to history, geography and world events -- and that our interest should extend beyond whether an international crisis rattles the stock market, as it did on Monday.

Personal connections can help us to understand the bigger picture, and that's true with Ukraine. On Thursday, President Obama said that a proposed referendum to allow the republic of Crimea to separate from Ukraine would violate Ukraine's constitution.

The Ukraine constitution was crafted with input from Senior Judge Richard L. Nygaard, of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Erie, after the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1992, Nygaard praised Ukraine's proposed constitution and said that each of the nations that had become independent of Russia needed to create rules of law that stayed constant, regardless of who was leading the nation. We follow that principle in this country. We will have to see if Ukraine does the same.

In a Guest Voice column on Thursday, Lena Surzhko-Harned, an assistant professor of political science at Mercyhurst University, wrote about how she views the crisis that led to an uprising against Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine's former president who fled the country.

"This is not a revolution against Russia; this is a revolution against a corrupt, kleptomaniac and murderous regime. Ukraine is a diverse country of multiple ethnic groups, but we are one people committed to the territorial integrity of our country and the human dignity of each of its 45 million citizens," wrote Surzhko-Harned, whose family still lives in Ukraine.

Violations of human dignity, no matter where they occur, should prompt us to pay attention to world events.