Talk about the longest day

So it’s afternoon nap time and I’m watching The Longest Day, you know, the 1962 D-Day movie with John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, George Segal, Fabian (really, IMDB says so), etc. And just as they get to the landing on Omaha Beach, with the Germans opening fire and Allied soldiers falling left and right, Genevieve wakes up and immediately wants to know what’s that going on, and why were those people falling down. I tried to say that it was a movie about a war, and that wars were terrible things, and that people got killed in wars, and she asked if those people on the TV were dying. After a couple more lame attempts, I realized that I had no plan or even good ideas for how I might want a conversation with a four year-old about war to proceed.

Some thoughts that quickly flashed through my mind before getting dismissed:

“Sometimes people disagree, and they get into a big fight. Oh, those are guns. Guns? Well, um…”

“War is the attempt of nation-states to obtain something from other nation-states by force.”

Right. So I fell back to parental plan C (for Change the subject). Specifically, I announced that it wasn't a very good movie anyway (another little white lie!) and changed the channel.

Later in the day, I spoke with Genevieve about guns, first asking her what she knew about them.

"Oh, only adults can have them, and hunters use them for when there's a bear and they have to shoot it."

From there, we talked about how guns and the bullets they shoot can kill things, which is another way of saying it makes them dead. And sometimes, people used guns to kill other people, like in wars, when they disagreed about something and couldn't work it out and had really big fights with lots of people fighting lots of other people. No, it didn't make much sense to me, either. We talked a little bit more about the movie she saw me watching and guns, and came to a good stopping point and moved on to other things.

After dinner I mentioned to Marilee about something about our conversation, and Marilee struck up a conversation about guns with Genevieve. It was clear that Genevieve understood that only adults could touch guns, and if they saw someone other than a police officer with a gun that they should tell an adult, or if they couldn't tell an adult then they could call 911. Then there was an extended conversation about why police officers carried guns and after some time of that Genevieve declared that she was ready to stop talking about guns.

Amen to that. If only our world didn't demand our knowledge of some of these things.