With baby grandson asleep in his arms, the Badger sat watching the TV news and skimming his smartphone in sanguine mood. As usual, the news seemed dominated by speculation and opinion, but that is just the way it is these days. Like every parent and grandparent that holds a baby in their arms, the Badger wondered about the world that the little one will experience as they grow up. Hopefully, it will be a better than today, but it is getting more difficult to be optimistic when misinformation, distortion, and polarization is rife and rising.
As the Badger watched the TV, a reporter asked an ex-soldier if they had been bullied or encountered prejudice during their service. The ex-soldier paused, smiled, and said ‘No. My unit was about teamwork, camaraderie, and getting the job done. Everything else was S.E.P’. On the mention of S.E.P – somebody else’s problem – ancient memories being an observer with some young soldiers in the back of an air defence vehicle came flooding back. Their regiment had been deployed on an airfield to help contractors on a major systems programme understand how things worked. Talking to the soldiers – none out of their teens – proved highly informative and watching the whole set up function as the airfield was buzzed by a fast, low flying, Harrier jet was awesome!
The young soldiers knew exactly what system improvements they wanted so that, as one put it, ‘we can shoot down more enemy planes than friendlies and still stay alive’. When asked if they worried about downing a friendly aircraft, they said that their job in a conflict was to fire on command, avoid being wiped out by the enemy, and quickly redeploy elsewhere ready to fire again. In that context, the ramifications of downing friendly aircraft were S.E.P – somebody else’s problem – not theirs! There was a tabloid newspaper with a front-page highlighting defence cuts in the vehicle. When asked about cuts, the soldiers were ambivalent. They said the paper was a) a source of entertainment rather than news, and b) for use as emergency toilet paper! As the baby slept peacefully in his arms, the Badger chuckled at the thought that this may still be the case for frontline soldiers in today’s digital world!
The Badger wistfully concluded that the foibles and problems of our modern online world are validly S.E.P for the baby grandson in his arms. For the rest of us, however, they are not S.E.P because unless the information we see, hear, and absorb becomes more trustworthy, we are headed for the kind of unruly future our children and grandchildren do not deserve. So, there you have it; you never know where your thoughts will take you unless you cuddle a baby while watching TV and using your smartphone!
