So if you haven’t seen it, there’s a pretty heartbreaking video about a father trying to explain the Paris terrorist attacks to his very young son, and it’s gone viral. It’s all over the place.
But the lesson in it is pretty stupid.
Watch it below:
OK look, that kid is adorable, and it’s a very charming video. But teaching your kid that “flowers and candles” defend us from monsters with guns is quite possibly the stupidest thing you can teach a kid.
It’s disquieting and disturbing to have to tell a kid that there are real monsters in the world, but do we really want them believing you bring flowers and candles to a gunfight?
Watch the video again when the dad tells his son that we have flowers – the kid looks at him like, “c’mon dad don’t be an idiot.”
I don’t want to be overly dour about it, and I realize that parents have to try to comfort their kids in whatever way they can in the face of such horror, but it just seems terribly indicative of the attitude of some Europeans about how to defeat Islamic terror – with candles, flowers, hashtags and solidarity marches.
I’ll take a gun over flowers for defense every time. You can always hold up a flower shop with it if you need them too.*
Hopefully that kid grows up to be a bad-ass French terrorist-slaughtering military hero despite his dad.