Nuclear Winter May Be Here Already

I got my oil changed a couple of days ago at one of those express places that seem to pop up like dandelions along most major thoroughfares in most towns. A young man, maybe late teens or early twenties approached the car as I waited in line. The young man was tall, broad-shouldered, smiled a lot, and had bright blue eyes. He spoke intelligently and clearly articulated his words. He seemed to be a relatively normal American male.

Taking information from me and writing it on his clipboard, he noticed my license plate, which in the state of Georgia marks me as a wounded combat veteran of the USMC. I guess he assumed that status made me an expert on the current Russia/Ukraine conflict and the world’s response to it. He asked my opinion, and rather than pontificate on one since I lacked the expertise, I chose to point out the commonsense dilemmas in the situation—how best to stop the bloodshed on both sides, how to punish the aggressor without starting World War III, how to bring humanitarian aid to the region, how to do it all without causing a psychopath to create a nuclear holocaust and destroy life on the planet.

“The situation is very tricky at this point, and no one has offered any viable solutions. Even a conventional war on the ground would be a bloodbath on both sides. Young people like you would be called upon to respond and risk your lives,” I said.

Considering that the end of the world as we know it could occur and the fact that a nuclear war would kill at least 100 million people on both sides in the first six hours, as I explained, his response shocked me. Believe me, I’m not easy to shock. He told me he was well-prepared for nuclear war. I made the mistake of asking how.

The young man explained, “I went to the gun store yesterday and bought me a nine-millimeter pistol. See, I’ve been playing this video game called Fallout and it shows you how to survive after a nuclear war to and keep all the bandits that are left over from getting your stuff.”

The sheer lack of understanding—the complete and utter incomprehension—astounded me. How was it possible in the 21^st century to lack all vestiges of common knowledge? How was it possible to receive an American public education and come away with no concept of the critical thinking needed to examine the real effects of all out nuclear war? With all the historical, philosophical, psychological, mathematical, geographical, social, and cultural information instantly available, how do our children end up so dumb. The new generation of youth are not stupid. They are not incapable of learning. They are not unwilling to learn. Who has brought us to the brink of intellectual extinction?

If video games are the best we can do to help our kids appreciate the cost of war, especially games precipitated on the idea that they personally would be able to survive, flourish, and build a new kingdom of America while everyone else on the planet was either incinerated on day one or withered away from starvation or radiation or disease, then we have failed this new generation and the ones to come after. We, who have seen the actual face of war as combatants in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanastan and managed to survive, who have studied in high school history class about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with a thousand years of other atrocities must have somehow helped create this bubble of delusion that surrounds them. This is not the fault of their teachers. Teachers have been hamstrung by rules and regulations designed to make public education fail as an excuse to create an elite private system that makes profit the top priority. Heavy blame can fall also on bureaucrats, politicians, and corporate sycophants who desire a dumbed-down and pliable work force for that can be easily controlled by sound bites and shiny objects. But blame lies with us individually as well. As parents we seem to believe that protecting our kids is the same thing as shielding them from all uncomfortable truths. We don’t want educators and writers or anyone else “triggering” them. That is a disastrous notion. When we get triggered we are forced to think about, analyze, and synthesize ideas outside our comfort zone. Learning takes place. We seem to have reached a point in our society—I’m speaking to the current white majority—where fear of facts and limited access to truth has become the norm. Words like excellence, unique, remarkable, outstanding, or brilliant cannot be spoken in reference to a society that chooses to hide its history.  That American exceptionalism exist somehow simply by virtue of being American, or that it exists because of any one race, is a lie.