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What we can learn from the war ‘over there’ that’s closer than you think.
Forget TikToks. Writers and cartoonists are documenting wars.
As a teacher, I find that I can’t ignore the war in Ukraine. I don’t teach history. Yet it seems insensitive to go on with our lives, with neatly structured lesson plans, while ignoring the fate of millions of people with brutally interrupted life plans. When I step out of class at the bell I may see robotics students working on a mechanical arm. When an Ukranian child comes out of a bomb shelter after the sirens subside, she sees a building down the street shredded by a missile, and her friends all gone.
Last month, around the time Putin’s war was being predicted, I had invited a Elliot Ackerman, an author and former soldier who had served in Afghanistan and and Iraq, to talk to my Writing and Publishing class. In Ackerman’s latest work, “2034: A novel about the next world war” which eerily reads like the news today, we are immersed in a geopolitical chess game of battleships, dashed diplomacy, and misinformation. All of this piped through our media platforms as events unravel in real time. Just as we are seeing in Ukraine, right now. Here’s a podcast with a bit more backstory to how we approached this.
To bring a war perspective to ‘publishing’ I had my students work with a set of documents (from Brown University’s Choices Program) on how political cartoonists help us process wars. I was surprised to learn that many well known cartoonists were recruited for the war effort. That includes Herblock, Bill Mauldin who at age 21 covered war for the 45th Division News, and even Theodor Geisel. Yes, Dr. Seuss was hired to create cartoons like this, helping the war effort even though he is largely remembered as a cartoonist for kids.
