War

 I sure hope we’re not headed into World War III.  Or even WWII.5, for that matter.

I get it; national sovereignty important, but honestly, when it comes right down to it, wouldn’t you rather be a living resident of a foreign country than a dead citizen of your original one?  (Especially when the boundaries of those millennia-old countries are an artifact of colonial imperialism that hardly goes back a hundred years?)

Seattle would be a likely military target and so it’s entirely plausible that the whole place would be vaporized in the first fifteen minutes of nuclear war.  I suppose that’s preferable to a protracted siege that would result in death by famine and pestilence.  On the other hand, couldn’t we just avoid the whole calamity through diplomacy and compromise?

The real problem, if you ask me, is metonymy.  

We say “the White House wants this” or “the Kremlin wants that,” when what’s really the case is that Joe Biden wants this or Vladimir Putin wants that; thus individual preferences assume the status of national priorities.  Then, all of a sudden, what a single person desires (usually a man, usually an old one) becomes tantamount to what an entire country desires and when you combine that with nuclear arsenals large enough to destroy every living thing on the planet multiple times over, you’ve got a perfect recipe for disaster.

It's terrifying to consider that the fate of humanity ultimately depends upon the degree to which one old white dude with his fingers on his country’s nuclear codes feels as if he’s been dissed by another old white dude with similar access to weapons of mass destruction.  When my grandfather was embarrassed, he’d go off and kill an entire half-gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, not half of the entire population of the world!

Does my attitude here paint me yellow as a coward?  Perhaps, but if discretion is the better part of valor, then at least I’m half-brave.