When I was a kid, back when we did air-raid drills in the hallways of my elementary school and listened to regular tests of the big yellow Civil Defense sirens mounted on utility poles here and there in my world, we had no illusions about what war would mean should it come to our home towns. Our parents and guardians read and then watched On the Beach, and we all knew what it was about. Playhouse 90 gave us Alas, Babylon, supposedly at a time (9:30 on a school night, as I recall) when we kids couldn’t watch it, but our elders did and it scared the stuffing out of those I knew. Even before we learned of nuclear winter, we knew that obliteration follows mushroom clouds.
And if that wasn’t enough to traumatize us, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove then converged on our collective consciousness to help us envision, however reluctantly, the human madness and hubris behind the unimaginable. The times were punctuated by reports of Soviet bomb tests, each one larger than its predecessor and always described as a multiplier of the American bombs that had incinerated whole cities in Japan in 1945.
But the Cuban Missile Crisis—soon regarded as a victory for the rationality and courage of one man—and then the nuclear test ban treaties offered kind of ironic rays of hope. We still knew what it would mean if the sirens sounded and our television sets became little satellites of the Civil Defense Broadcast system: even if we had fallout shelters, it was over.
Oh, fallout shelters. Fortunate and foresighted citizens with real estate and cash to spare could dig and fortify these backyard bunkers and fill them with food and water to outlast the apocalypse—and, it was soon well known enough to mention, with the guns and ammunition it would take to fight off neighbors desperate to get in. I lived in the country, but no one in my family or our circle of friends had one—it seemed like a futile gesture, and then there was what was going to come after.
Bizarrely, I now find myself wondering whether the relatively “small” scale of the Vietnam conflict retrospectively took some of the sting out of the idea of war for our society, especially as my generation aged and begat our own children. The dreadful Friday evening Vietnam death counts on the television news seemed far removed from the millions and billions who would perish in a nuclear holocaust. If the subsequent regional wars since the 1970s have made war once again conceivable and even, tragically, doable, it’s not hard to blame the live coverage and general disassociation from middle-class American life that such coverage has represented. After all, we watched “shock and awe” unfold from our living room sofas.
Science fiction also gave us maleficent but defeatable aliens as proxies for human enemies with annihilative power. Brave pilots in fighter jets would bring down the motherships of evil galactic empires, guaranteeing a permanent “independence day” for humankind. And even Luke Skywalker was just a humanoid kid raised on a farm, at least for all he knew….
The conflict in Ukraine, a tragic spectacle with its cast of obvious heroes and villains making their nightly appearances on the TV news, may be adding to the unreality of war for the American bourgeois audience. It’s about refugees and searingly painful photos that tend to be on a very individual human scale, even when it’s ruined buildings and unlivable neighborhoods. But the good folks are making Molotov cocktails, handheld, individual, short-range armaments. The leader of the aggressor state is talking about nuclear weapons, but it’s almost too easy to imagine these as battlefield-scale incendiaries and not, as an escalating conflict and the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction assure us, the first and essentially final step in the end of the world as we know it.
And for our students? The war is thousands of miles and several language regions removed from their homes, fought in a place that may look kind of like America but clearly isn’t. How could it affect us, other than higher prices for the things that grownups have to buy? Our social networks still work, and teachers are still assigning science homework and history quizzes. These things, too, will pass for comfortable Americans, won’t they? The war in Ukraine won’t really hurt us, will it?
I worry that our collective understating of the scale of potential harm in this war may mirror our general denial of the immediacy of climate change, which will generally only inconvenience comfortable Americans if they don’t live in a meteorologically vulnerable spot, right? But even then, you can always move, can’t you? If sea level rises and the climate warms, we just go somewhere in the mountains and crank up the A/C, don’t we? As if.
In other words, despite the potential for trauma-induced anxiety and possibly worse outcomes for individuals—outcomes that we can meet and address—are we sanitizing the world too much for our students? Does the comfort that the comfy middle classes are often too quick to impute to all our fellow citizens as a way to ignore deep systemic issues provide the illusion that affluence is a shield against truly existential threats? Can or should schools, especially schools serving these comfortable classes, do more to frame the challenges the world is facing in ways that truly keep it real?
There’s another, bigger question, obviously. Why can’t the leaders of the world, wherever and however they are, get their acts together and fix things? Seven billion humans depend on this happening, and so do all the flora and fauna of the planet. We could obviate the need to teach the horrors by simply committing as a civilization to take care of one another and the resources we share. We could, so why don’t we?
And that’s why I call myself a cockeyed optimist. Dammit, I watched On the Beach; I don’t have to live it, do I?