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The Boy has been home from college for a couple of weeks; he heads back this Saturday. So we’ve been at full strength again for a bit.
When he’s away, The Girl is the only kid in the house. Outnumbered by parents, she doles out information on a need-to-know (or needed-to-know) basis. But with The Boy around, the numbers are more even. They can bounce off each other, and the relative safety in numbers means that discussion flows more freely. That means, among other things, that generation-based differences in perspective are coming to the surface.
Some of them are easy and harmless. TB didn’t like one sweater he got for Christmas, pronouncing it “too ’90s.” I liked it, which didn’t really disprove his point. During the Bills’ playoff game, I mentioned Scott Norwood honking the winning field goal in Super Bowl 25; from TB’s response, you’d think I had mentioned Periclean Athens. Fair enough; it happened a decade before he was born. (To me, it exists out of time, like Buckner missing the ground ball in game six. But yes, technically, it happened at one distinct moment.) It’s reasonable that his points of historical reference would be different, just as mine were from my dad’s.
I didn’t expect such a bracing difference of perspective when the news broke about President Trump ordering the assassination of Iranian general Suleimani. But there it was.
TW and I interpreted the attack as yet another example of the doomed-yet-persistent “if we keep bombing them, we can make them like us” school of foreign policy. The key words there are “yet another.” Yes, it was particularly egregious, but the idea that the U.S. would do something violent, impulsive and self-defeating in the Middle East isn’t exactly new. We treated it as simply the latest confirmation of our priors, which, admittedly, isn’t ideal. (Old joke: “Confirmation bias. Just as I suspected.”) Grade on a curve long enough, and even a hard fail starts to look like a D-minus.
But the kids, plugged into different networks, saw it entirely differently. They started talking, at least semi-earnestly, about a draft. They reported that their social networks were on fire with talk of an imminent draft. They saw it as a very real short-term possibility, and they were nervous.
That hadn’t even occurred to me. The Boy is 18; in retrospect, of course that would be more real to him than to me.
They’re relatively savvy; they understand that a draft would have to pass Congress, which includes the very House that just impeached the president. That would take a certain amount of effort. Surprisingly -- at least to me -- they were both familiar with the ’90s comedy Wag the Dog, and they could connect the dots. And they picked up on our cues, drawing some comfort from the fact that we didn’t think the danger was quite as real as they did.
That said, I have to admit that the last few years have broken enough precedents that I can’t be quite as confident in established patterns as I used to be. Just because something would be ridiculous doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Looking for some concrete, plausible comfort, I suggested that if there is a war, it will probably be more a war of cyberattrition than of massive troop movements. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know, but a draft wouldn’t help in a war of cyberattrition. If some rogue states loose hackers on us, more infantry won’t be the answer. Of course, that also implies that it would be harder to insulate ourselves from the effects of a conflict, which is scary in its own right. But that’s a different kind of fear.
They weren’t entirely convinced. If I were 18, I might not be entirely convinced, either.
I’ll be watching, to the extent I can, to see if any of that conversation is happening on my own campus. College is stressful enough without that looming over you. In the meantime, I’ll keep hoping that my skepticism is more than just an historical holdover.
