One thing I noticed when I recently talked to high-school students in Lake Cowichan who were protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the real fear that was on many of their faces.
Students from Lake Cowichan Secondary School’s Social Justice 12 took to the streets waving signs in support of the people of Ukraine and calling for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to be overthrown and imprisoned as a means to express their anxieties with the increasingly bloody invasion, and their frustration that the war, for that’s what it is, keeps going on as the death toll continues to rise.
“I’m afraid the invasion of Ukraine will begin a domino effect that could lead to the Third World War and end all of our lives,” one of the students told me. “Putin must be stopped now before this gets out of hand. People want to get more involved to help stop this.”
Unlike the days of the Cold War when I was young, these kids did not grow up with the threat of radioactive mushroom clouds hanging over their heads.
As far as they were concerned, all of that belonged to their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations and had been relegated to history books and Hollywood movies.
These students believed they lived in a new world order where wars were only fought between small and unruly nations and communities in other parts of the planet, and had little or no impact on their lives.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the Soviet Union in 1991, I was even beginning to believe that myself.
I recall a book that was well read at the time called the The End of History and the Last Man by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
In the book, Fukuyama argued that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War, humanity has reached not just the passing of a particular period of post-Second World War history, but the end of history itself as we know it.
He claimed that after trying many different ways to rule ourselves over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Western liberal democracy had proven to be the best and final form of human government, and the world would likely be a much more peaceful and civilized as a result, with no more major wars.
And, despite some exceptions, the world has been generally a more peaceful place ever since.
The fears I had as a child of going to big cities because they would be the first targets in a world-wide thermonuclear war, which I figured could happen at any time over a real, or imagined, incident between the two super powers, started to fade and those concerns bothered me less and less as time went by.
But now, here we are, facing a Russian leader, who is more of a mafia don than a president, bent on revenge for what he perceives as the West’s continued antagonism toward his country, and stating to a worried world that he won’t hesitate to use his plentiful nuclear weapons if he doesn’t get his way.
We’re living in a time that is arguably more perilous than the Cuban missile crisis was in 1962.
I mentioned to my editor one day last week that I was wondering why I was coming in to work every day when I really should be home digging a big hole in my backyard in which to place a bomb shelter.
It strikes me as sad and scary that a species that has rovers on Mars, constructed gleaming cities, and mastered medicine and science can still kill each other by the thousands in many gruesome ways, and destroy everything in their paths without a second thought.
Those kids in Lake Cowichan have every right to be scared, and so should we all.
robert.barron@cowichanvalleycitizen.com
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