Here's what I told my daughter.
My daughter doesn't really know what I do for work. |
Sure, she knows that I work at a newspaper and that I spend a lot of time on my phone or in front of the computer. But oftentimes I could say that I am an astronaut and spend the time between school drop-off and pickup on the surface of the moon, and she'd just nod along and ask for more Goldfish. |
And then there are moments when you can watch her 7-year-old mind trying to wrap itself around something truly beyond her comprehension — like why so many people are suddenly talking about war. |
Questions about war are something that a onetime war correspondent like me should be able to field with the ease of a slow ground ball. But I confess to being pretty flat-footed when the subject came up, at least coming from my child. |
To answer that question fairly is to balance two competing parental impulses: the desire to protect your offspring from the brutality of the world and the desire to prepare them for life beyond the safety of the front door. |
Those of us far from the battlefields are lucky to have such a choice. For too many Israeli children, the brutality of the world burst through their front doors with guns spurting fire and lead. For too many Palestinian children in the days since, Israeli bombs reduced their homes to rubble before they could flee. |
It's difficult enough to talk to adults about the nuance and complexity of the conflict in the Middle East, much less what they should think about it. For my daughter, I stuck to the basics: Wars are scary, but our family is lucky in that for us, they are also far away. Although that assurance eroded somewhat as supporters of Israeli and Palestinian causes physically attacked each other in New York and elsewhere around the world. |
The conflict in Gaza isn't a world war (yet), but wars today are more global than ever before. The digital trench lines span continents and bring with them ghastly images of broken bodies and shattered cities. That's something new, our generation's contribution to the age-old business of killing: livestreaming. |
Yet we owe it to ourselves to not get lost in images of that bleakness for too long and to protect our children from it for as long as we are able. And to push, in whatever way we're able, for peace. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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