What is your occupation?

Or who is taking your time, occupying your land and denying you liberty?

Residents of Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine, gathered to protest the arrival of Russian troops on March 2 as Moscow continues its military invasion for the seventh day. Shots can be heard in the background of an amateur video shot by a protester who says, “They are trying to intimidate us.” The shots appear to be fired into the air by Russian forces in an attempt to disperse the protest, while demonstrators remain defiant.

We all take are freedom for granted as Boris Yeltsin says we don’t appreciate what we have when we have it. I would go further and say like oxygen we need it in order to sustain life and breathe. Some of us only can imagine waking up to the sound of shelling or even worse a shell falling on our home. But that is no longer left to the imagination in Ukraine.

Imagine waking up and finding an occupying tank from a foreign force on your doorstep, stealing from your county the right to vote, for who you believe in Your right to say and do what you believe to be right. Or go to where you want, when you want. These are all rights that as a reader of this article you and others in your country have and like air those rights are all around you and like oxygen your society needs them in order to sustain a healthy political ecosystem.