Armageddon Time

It was tough getting to sleep at our house last night. My son had a pepperoni calzone for dinner, and then we all watched the pilot episode of "Battlestar Galactica." For those of your who are unfamiliar, in both the original version and in this revisioning, most of the human race has to be wiped out in order to get the ball rolling. With a belly full of pepperoni and a brain full of genocide, we packed my son off to bed, imagining that three weeks of middle school would have prepared him for such an arduous late-night journey. We were wrong.
On a good day, this is a thoughtful kid, and the idea of the entire population of a planet being blown up by scheming humanoid robots did not let him go quietly into that good night. He was not going to be lulled to sleep with any of that "it's only a movie" talk. He had life and death on his mind, and he wasn't going to simply roll over and forget about it. Sometime after midnight, i went into his room and decided to confront the problem directly. I asked him why it was any different from Darth Vader blowing up Alderaan with the Death Star.
"The Cylons used nukes, dad."
This was a point I had to concede. Using that quaint twentieth century device instead of some colorful "laser," the the Battlestar folks created a much more intimate apocalypse than George Lucas. My oh-so-clever-son had made this fine distinction at what was approaching one in the morning, and he was unable to shrug it off. On the contrary: in the darkness, the fear was magnified, and even though he was gamely accepting all my suggestions for distraction, he needed some kind of reassurance. He wanted to know that if he called out in the night to his mom and dad that they would hear him.
I know that my job as a parent is to make sure that he doesn't have feel that way. It starts with having the presence of mind to anticipate the effects of the movies and TV that he watches. It includes the sense of what certain images will do in concert with minor dyspepsia. And it made me think that I need to have him read Kurt Vonnegut's version of the end of life in "Slaughterhouse Five": "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." But maybe not this week. We need to get some rest.