It all feels a bit "end of the worldy" at the moment, doesn’t it? At least people of a certain age—such as myself—know how this goes. We’ve seen it all before: talk of the "gathering storm"; the claims this year feels like 1939; the footage of Russian bombers being escorted away from Polish airspace.
But for your children, the thought of war can be a wrench. It’s not so much like discovering Santa doesn’t really deliver your presents down the chimney, but that Santa is coming down the chimney and he’s got a gun. It’s simultaneously inconceivable and horrifying, like Mumford & Sons.
When I’m trying to reassure my daughters that everything will be OK, it doesn’t help when Vladimir Putin keeps mobilizing troops on the Baltic, or when Iran attacks its neighbors because they helped Donald Trump. Then there is China leaning menacingly over Taiwan. And now we have the sense of certainty that AI will put us out of our misery at some point regardless.
Maybe even before we get the chance to deliberately blow ourselves up. "Is there going to be a war?" my youngest daughter asked me at the dinner table. Meaning are "we" going to be at war.
In the literal sense the answer is "no." That’s because as a Brit I recently found out my country barely has any armed forces. Our once great Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and army are now so denuded we may be reduced to garden forks and Amazon Fire sticks to defend ourselves. At least our inner-cities are well stocked with knife-wielding maniacs, who might come in handy if Russian special forces were stupid enough to parachute into east London.
But my daughters are not interested in the details of the U.K.’s reduced fighting capacity, but rather in the prospect of being directly involved in a way that has become increasingly inconceivable for us in the West. You know, of actually being bombed. Or worse still, being bombed with one of those things that makes a big mushroom cloud.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
