By Diana Holbourn
Child Genius Becky Learns, Teaches and Entertains a Lot During her First Months of University
Book one of the online Becky Bexley series. Chapter 4.
This series accompanies the books about what Becky does at university and afterwards, which you can find out more about on my author website. (The online series is in draft form.)
Becky had a good think about a lot of the things she'd heard the other students say over their long long lunch breaks. She met up with some of them over lunch again not long after her comedy performances.
Just after they sat down, one student commented gloomily, "They say it's going to rain later on this afternoon!"
Another student said, "It's funny! When I first went outside this morning, it smelled as if it had already been raining, but I don't think it had."
One of the others joked, "Maybe weather forecasters have got a new kind of technology; instead of just telling us about the weather, they send a smell through people's television screens and through the air that'll remind people what the forecast is going to be. If it's going to be sunny they could trigger off smells of barbecues and the sea."
"Even in winter?" said one student, laughing. "People would hate that! It would set off cravings for holidays. Mind you, travel agents would love it! There might be a rush to book holidays to sunnier countries every time it happened!"
"Wow, imagine if the technology really was available to waft smells through people's television screens!" said another student dreamily. "They might rename television smellevision. Maybe smells would be wafted into people's homes all the way through films and programmes; if they were showing a nice flower garden, a nice smell of flowers would waft into people's rooms!"
"Yes, and if they were showing piles of old dead fish, just think what that would be like," said another student with a grin.
"Advertisers would love that technology!" said one student. "If there was an advert for a certain perfume, the smell of it would waft into people's homes. If they were advertising beer, the smell of that would come in. If they were advertising pies, you'd get the smell of freshly cooking ones."
"Gosh, your house would smell like a bar by the end of the evening!" said another of the students with a smile.
Another one said, "I've heard that supermarkets really do use a technique like that, as well as other ones, to make people want to buy things more. I heard that when people go past the bread, they can smell a nice smell of fresh bread, but that's not really coming from the bread, but the smell's being wafted through the air vents or something. And they do that with other things."
The mood turned serious, and a student called Mark said, "Remember a few weeks ago someone talked about some things scientists do that get reported in the papers as if they're more dramatic than they really are, like if a team of researchers thinks they might be able to make a breakthrough one day because they've been researching some disease, and experiments with mice have found that some of them recover when something about their genes gets changed or something, but the article in the paper might not say till near the end that it could take years before it's found out whether doing that has the same effect on humans? Everyone, from scientists who are hoping to get more funding for their work, to journalists looking for a good story, wants it to sound promising, so the good bits can end up being highlighted but the downsides barely get a mention?"
The other students said they remembered someone talking about that, and Mark carried on:
"I watched a television programme about scientists who want to do things that'll benefit humanity, but they don't do them, because a lot of the public are opposed to what they want to do, not because they know it's risky, but because they're worried it might be, or they just think it sounds yucky.
"One thing is genetically modifying food, for reasons like making it more drought-resistant or more resistant to disease. So many people could benefit, especially in countries where they can go horribly short of food if the rains fail or crops are attacked by blight and things.
"And it's not just plants; I heard scientists would like to genetically modify herds of cows to make their immune systems naturally more resistant to TB, and flocks of chickens so they're more resistant to bird flu, but they don't think they can because they don't think the public will approve.
"But I don't see why scientists think it's such a problem getting the public on their side if they already know how to put a positive spin on their work. Still, maybe they could do with a few more ideas.
One of the students said, "I'd say! Yeah. Actually, I have heard a lot of really interesting scientific stuff I didn't have any trouble understanding at all; so they can't be all that bad. But I heard something on the radio about genes the other day. It sounded daft to me! ... Well, to be fair, it wasn't a scientist trying to explain it; it was a journalist, I think. The programme was something about genes, and I thought it would be interesting to learn something about them. But instead of just talking about genetic code, they were saying things like, 'Four letters in different combinations make up the entire manual of instructions to make a human. The letters are A, G, C and T. We'll call each of the instructions sentences, and all of them in combination a book. So everyone's a book, made up of lots and lots of sentences. We'll call each set of instructions in the book volumes.'
"Something like that anyway. I can't quite remember what they said now, but they were going on like that for ages, talking about words and letters and sentences, instead of just telling us about what genes really are. It was confusing! I mean, what is a genetic 'letter' really? Letters can't really be anything to do with what's really inside us! They made it sound as if people have got masses and masses of scrabble letters rattling around inside them or something!
"Just imagine if people were really like that! Every time anyone moved, they'd make a rattly noise! Imagine how loud it would sound in the middle of a city, with loads of people rattling around! And when the rattling got louder at certain times of year, maybe some people would wonder why, and other people would explain to them that it was the tourist season.
"Or imagine watching people run a marathon! All the momentum from them running would make the letters rattle around even louder! People might have to wear ear plugs to protect their ears from all the noise!
"And imagine if a big crowd of people walked past your house unexpectedly one day. One of your family might look up and say in surprise, 'Gosh, is it thundering? The weather was nice this morning! You don't think it's an explosion, do you?' And you might say reassuringly, 'No, it's only a crowd of people walking past. I think they're going to that peace protest that's on in the town today.'
"It annoys me when scientists and people like that compare things to other things they don't really seem to have anything to do with! I'm guessing they think it's going to make it easier for us to understand if they explain it like that; but I think it just sounds weird! I've heard this letter thing before; but I've never heard anyone explain in just what way strands of genetic code compare to letters. They seem to be two completely different things to me! Maybe I'd understand it better if I knew about the science of genes. But then if I did, I'd need to hear genes compared to letters even less, because I'd know what they really were!
"Maybe it would be complicated to explain it properly, but they could at least compare genes to something they're really more like. It seems to me that comparing them to letters is a bit like calling a car a pile of laundry, because you somehow imagine it would be easier for your half-witted listeners to understand what you're talking about that way.
"Just imagine someone on the radio saying, 'I jumped in my pile of laundry this morning and zoomed off to work. When I got here, I parked it in the public car park and came into the studio. Piles of laundry make life so much more convenient! If I couldn't come to work in a pile of laundry, I suppose I'd have to walk, and it would take ages! And they're so convenient when you need to carry a lot of things, since the pile of laundry takes the load, instead of you having to! Tomorrow I'm going to go shopping in mine, and then in the evening I'm going to drive it to a friend's house and have a cup of tea and a chat with them, after I've parked it conveniently in their driveway. They've got a garage, but I've noticed that piles of laundry nowadays tend to be too big to fit in people's garages, which must have been built in the days when piles of laundry were made smaller.'
"And the other day I heard some scientists on a show on the radio talking about improvements that need to be made in the world and why they need to be made; and there was this one who really cares about stopping coral from dying as a result of global warming, for some reason. The presenter asked her why, and she just said it was because of biodiversity, as if she somehow expected that if she said that, everyone would instantly know what biodiversity is and what it has to do with it, and understand why that makes it important! I know a little bit about biodiversity - it's something to do with how it's important to have lots of species of a thing in the world or else a disease might wipe the ones we have out, and there'll be none left, while if there were more species of it, most of them might be immune to the disease so it wouldn't affect them."
One of the others grinned and said for fun, "A 'thing'? What is that 'thing' then? You said it's important to have more than one species of it. Why is that 'thing' so special - whatever it is?"
The one who'd been talking before smiled broadly and said, "You know what I mean! I wasn't really talking about just one thing! Anyway, I knew a little bit about what this scientist meant when she said it's important to stop coral dying because of biodiversity, because I once heard on another programme that algae live in coral, and if the coral dies, they'll die, and that'll mean the fish that eat them will starve to death or something because their food supply's gone, and that'll mean the fish that eat those will starve because they won't be able to eat them any more, ... and it'll go on and on like that till everything runs out of food and we all die and the world ends. ... Well allright, I don't think anyone thinks it would be that drastic. ... Well, some people might, for all I know. But the programme I heard didn't really say that, I don't think.
"... Actually, is that to do with biodiversity, or is it something else? I think my chicken burger must have befuddled my brain ... or maybe it's just always befuddled anyway, and I can't quite think of what the difference is now, if there is one.
"But anyway, just imagine if this scientist had tried to explain why she thinks it's important for coral to live the way that journalist on the radio who was talking about genes had tried to explain them by going on about letters and sentences instead. You know - imagine if she talked about things that seemed completely unrelated to them. At least she didn't do that! Imagine what kinds of things she might have said if she had. Maybe she would have said:
"'We're worried about the coral dying because of global warming. We'll call it a plate of ginger biscuits. There's a lot of algae living in the plate of ginger biscuits, that gives it nutrients that it lives on. We'll call it rice krispies. Now if the ginger biscuits die, all the rice krispies will be ejected into the sea, and since they won't then have a home, they'll die, and that'll be a tremendous shame, because there are little fish that I'll call raisins that feed on the rice krispies, and if there aren't so many rice krispies in the ocean, the raisins might starve to death, and that'll be a big shame for some other fish, which I'll call almonds, because the almonds swim around catching and eating the raisins living in the seas, and if the raisins die so the almonds no longer have a food supply, they might die out too, and that'll be a shame for some bigger fish, that I'll call currant buns, that feed off the almonds.
"'Fishermen make huge catches of currant buns in the ocean at the moment, and without the almonds to feed off, the currant buns might die out, which would be bad for humans, since they're a great source of vitamin D, which I'll call nail varnish. Sunshine also provides nail varnish, but in places that don't get much sun, it's important for health that humans get it in their diet from currant buns. If humans didn't get so much nail varnish, their bones, which I'll call snakes, wouldn't grow so strong.
"'Another problem that might occur if the currant buns in the sea died out is that they keep down the population of almonds by eating them, and without them, the almond population would explode, since nothing would be around to eat them, and they'd swim around feasting on the raisins in the sea, which then wouldn't be able to keep down the population of rice krispies, so any of those that survived after the ginger biscuits died out because of global warming might breed and breed until the sea was just awash with rice krispies, and they might entirely take over the place, which would deprive other life forms, which I'll call banana chips, of the oxygen they would need to survive, as well as turning the sea into a massive puddle of slimy-looking toxic water that raisins, almonds, currant buns, and all kinds of other things won't tolerate swimming in, because it just won't be healthy for them!
"'If the problem gets bad, you could even start to see dead currant buns and raisins and almonds and banana chips washing up all over our beaches, because not having enough oxygen in the water, which I'll call orange juice, will kill the poor things!'
"I mean, this biodiversity thing and this thing about trying to keep coral alive might be massively important, for all I know; but if it is, I'd have thought this scientist could have done a better job of explaining why, instead of just telling us corals are good for biodiversity, as if she just assumed we'd all be bound to decide it must be important just because of that!"
The other students were grinning. But then one said, "I think there is something important about biodiversity. Something to do with protecting our food supply from disease, I think. Well, maybe more than that. But it reminds me of a documentary on telly, where they said someone was planning to somehow get some DNA from ancient strong trees, such as trees that might have grown in Sherwood Forest in the time of Robin Hood, that they could tell must have been really hardy, because the trees had lived for hundreds of years, and they were planning to use their DNA to grow new trees, by cloning them, I think, in the hope that they'd be just as hardy. I thought that sounded like a really interesting idea.
"Actually, I'm not sure how trees can be cloned. I've got a vague idea of how scientists do that to animals - I think they get a cell from an adult female animal, or sometimes an embryo, and then they get an egg from the same animal or a different one, and then take the DNA out of the middle of the egg, and put the cell with all the genetic information in it from the animal they want to clone in its place, and then they implant it in the womb of the animal they've chosen to bring it to birth, after they've kept it in a test tube for several days to make sure its cells are dividing so it's growing, and done something else to it to keep it alive; and then it can grow into a baby animal, with all the DNA of the female they took the cell from. ... Oh, sorry if I'm putting anyone off their food. I've just put myself off mine, actually.
"But anyway, in this programme I saw, it was interesting what they said about cloning hardy trees. But then someone on the telly said it might not be that good an idea really, because for all anyone knew, there might be diseases around nowadays that weren't around when the trees were around, because maybe they'd been accidentally carried across the globe by travellers or something, and if the old trees they put in an area were all the same, a disease like that might easily wipe them out, whereas what would help prevent all the trees of a certain kind in an area from being wiped out by some disease is biodiversity - if there were trees there with slightly differing genes, which might increase the chances that some of the genes would make the trees that had them resistant to the disease."
Mark said, "That's interesting. Cloning trees? I wonder if the public would mostly think that was a great idea if they were told that some of the trees would come from the old Sherwood Forest. Probably a lot more would approve of that than approve of cloning animals. You can understand why, since people are bound to wonder if the cloned animals will have horrible health problems. But I think this is another example of what I was talking about before, where a lot of people might object to it just because it sounds yucky or something, without looking into whether there really are high risks of problems, and what the benefits might be. I don't know how often that really goes on; I've just heard that some scientists think it's a problem.
"Anyway, I heard that scientists trying to clone sheep and other farm animals like pigs thought it might be useful, because they were hoping that they could end up cloning animals that had been genetically engineered to produce a human protein in their milk that makes blood clot more easily, that could be purified and given to people with haemophilia. You know - that's a horrible genetic disease that means the blood doesn't clot, so if someone who's inherited it even just bumps themselves on anything, any bruise they get will swell up a lot, because they'll be bleeding inside and it won't easily stop, and the blood will bleed into their surrounding tissues and joints and muscles, so they can get a lot of pain in them, and they get damaged over time.
"At the moment, I think people with haemophilia have to have regular transfusions of a product made from some things in blood that helps the blood clot, so whenever they start bleeding, their blood will be able to form hard clots over the place they're bleeding from, so it can stop. But I've read that that stuff's always in short supply, and it's hard to make, and it's really expensive, especially because people with haemophilia will likely need loads of it over their lifetime.
"So the scientists hoping to work out how to clone some farm animals were thinking that one way doing that might be useful is if they could produce animals that would make milk with a blood-clotting human protein in it. And then they thought that sometime in the future, they might be able to clone genetically engineered animals where they made their milk contain other substances that would be useful for people with some kinds of genetic lung diseases, like that horrible disease cystic fibrosis, and maybe also to make their organs more suitable to be transplanted into humans whose organs are failing, I think, like if they need liver transplants, because the problem is that there's always a shortage of suitable human donors, so some people have to wait on the transplant list for years, suffering with the problems caused by their organs that aren't working properly.
"I can't say I'd really fancy an animal's liver or something; but if it was something that had been grown from one, and things had been done to it to make it suitable, I'd probably think being given it was at least better than being seriously ill, and always at risk of dying!
"Anyway, I read that scientists think they'd only need to clone about sixty pigs to produce enough milk with the added protein in it to produce all the clotting substance they'd need for all the people with haemophilia in the whole of America! According to what I read, pigs produce loads of milk, so milking them every day would mean they'd be able to make all the clotting substance they needed. And it's possible to breed animals from the cloned animals, so scientists wouldn't have to clone one every time they wanted one.
"But there are problems with cloning farm animals. I don't think they've managed to clone enough of them yet that they'd be able to get them to produce those kinds of substances cheaply or very often. But I think they want to carry on trying.
"But I read that cloning itself is very expensive; and they found that the cloned animals have been more likely to get health problems. There was this famous sheep called Dolly they managed to clone from a cell from a sheep that was six years old, and they were really pleased at first, but they discovered that the cell she came from in the first place divided into cells that were all like as if they were the same as the cells of the six-year-old sheep the first one came from, so it was as if the little baby sheep that was born had already aged about six years; and they put her down about six years earlier than the age sheep normally are when they die, partly because she got the kinds of health problems you might expect an old sheep to get, like severe arthritis, I think. So you wouldn't want to clone animals that did that.
"The thing is though that I reckon that the more they experiment, the more they're likely to come up with solutions to those problems, since they experimented with cloning quite a bit before they managed to clone a sheep successfully, and loads of animal foetuses and some animal babies died, I think, but then they worked out how to do it better, and they managed to clone one that lived; the famous sheep lived for about six years."
One of the other students joked wryly, "If you carry on talking about animals getting diseases and dying and things, I think I might vomit myself to death, and then I'll have died really prematurely myself, even though I haven't been cloned! And it'll be all your fault! How will you feel about that?"
Mark said, "Sorry! I think this stuff's interesting though. Anyway, I know it doesn't seem fair to animals to do that kind of thing to them. But if in a couple of years, scientists found the answers, and then the animals themselves weren't suffering, I don't see what would be the problem with it.
"But - I might be wrong - but I think a lot of people would object to the idea even then, without really thinking about it, just because it sounds a bit scary or something. That's the impression I've got from some things I've heard anyway.
"But I wonder if they still would if scientists publicised more enthusiastic press releases about the benefits of doing things like that, and did more other things to get people interested, and so they had more information about the benefits.
"I think it must be easy to get the public on your side if you just know how; after all, politicians are good at it! Especially at election time! And if They can do it, I'm sure scientists can!"
Mark descended into gloom as he said, "I mean, politicians even manage to get a lot of the public supporting horrible wars they start, where a lot of people are bound to get horribly injured and killed! That's been going on for a long long time! I read that in the First World War, the prime minister, Lloyd George, told a Guardian journalist that he'd been to a speech the night before about what was really going on in the war, and that even 'hardened politicians' were moved by it. He said if the public knew what was really going on, the war would be ended the very next day, but that they couldn't possibly know, because journalists didn't report the full horror of it but made it sound like something noble, full of people carrying out 'gallant deeds'. But he said that even if journalists wanted to report the full truth, the censors wouldn't let them."
"And who was controlling the censors?" asked one student. "Probably people like Him, who started the war, so he probably Wouldn't Want people to know what was really happening!"
Mark descended into even more gloom as he said, "That's true. From what I've read, it seems that in the First World War, some newspaper editors put some kind of pressure on journalists to tow the line, for some reason, which meant supporting the war; and for some reason, they actually even made up some stories. When the war first started, it seems they made up stories that made it seem as if the people of Belgium were being treated with a lot more brutality by Germans than they really were. And it turned out that that really mattered, since some people who hadn't supported the war at first started trying to persuade other people to support it to protect the people of Belgium, which it's possible led to more people volunteering to go and fight in it. I'm not sure it did; but I think there might have been more opposition to the war if it hadn't been for stories like that, which might have made some people think twice about going to fight, where they ended up being killed.
"It turns out that there was actually a law passed soon after war began that made it illegal to criticise the war effort in a way that might spread alarm or dampen the morale of the population or among the armed forces. I read an observation that the word 'morale' in reality was meant in government circles to mean the amount of enemy action a person would be willing to tolerate, rather than being to do with their emotions! I read that some journalists who managed to get to the frontline of the fighting were even threatened with being shot if they broke the law about that!
"So German victories could go unreported, and defeats could be reported as actual victories; and the ignorant tactics of the generals who were ordering British soldiers to do what they somehow imagined would be a good idea, that turned out to be a bad one, could go unreported, like attacking where the German frontlines were strong instead of using some other tactic, when it just led to lots of people being killed and injured!
"I think not everything was the generals' fault. I mean, I heard that before the horrible Battle of the Somme, the Germans were hiding in underground trenches for a while, for some reason, and the idea was that shells should be aimed into the holes that led to their underground hideouts to kill them, and the people were ordered to fire into them for days before they tried to take over the land the Germans held, which the battle was supposed to retrieve; but it took so much effort to manage to aim shells into the holes accurately that people tended not to bother, but just fired them randomly in the hope it would kill the enemy, only to discover afterwards that no one had been hurt by them, because all the Germans had been underground and the shells hadn't affected people below the surface of the ground. I don't know all that much about it. But it seems some serious mistakes were made by a fair number of people before the horrible battle began, where loads of people were killed and injured.
"I read that some journalists or newspaper editors were given awards for good journalism; but some of them thought of them as likely bribes for keeping quiet about what had really been going on!
"Hopefully things have got much better nowadays. But I've heard that even these days, there's still a lot most journalists don't tell the public, which could seriously change public opinion if they did, things about civilian casualties. I read that in the Vietnam War, there were millions, but the American government would have looked terrible if they'd been thoroughly investigated, so they weren't reported on much at all for years.
"It's been claimed that people at the top sometimes subtly threaten journalists that it could be bad for their careers in some way if they ask too many awkward questions or do too much reporting about things the government really wouldn't want the public to know, or that if they carry on, they'll find it much more difficult to persuade people in power to be available to answer their questions in the future.
"So it's not what they say, but what they don't say that keeps a lot of public opinion on side. I mean, I heard that a lot of journalists travel with troops in war zones nowadays, and in some ways that's good because they're close to the action, and they're protected from enemy groups who might want to kidnap them or execute them. But it means that what they see is decided For them - they won't be going off to find out the full details of the stories of civilians who found themselves caught up in things and are suffering.
"So if they're travelling with the winning side, they can make things sound exciting when they've done something that looks like a success, when really there are some horrendous things happening to a lot more people, but they're not being reported.
"Or if some people in the civilian population of the country they're in are pleased to see the troops defeating the people they're fighting, what they say or do can be reported, and because the stories of civilians who are suffering are given much less publicity, it can give the impression that the population of the whole country is pleased."
One student said, "That's interesting. But I think there must be other reasons why a lot of things don't get reported as well, since there are a lot of horrible things that go on in the world that hardly ever get reported, for some reason, not just wars, but all kinds of things, like children who are made to work in mines and other horrible places in some countries to help make their families a living, and how people with cancer are being denied painkilling drugs in some developing countries even though their governments can afford to spend money on them, and things like that."
Another student said, "That's bad! Maybe a lot of things could be changed for the better if governments got together and put their minds to it! Or maybe they often wouldn't change. I think some of the things governments have tried have even had the opposite effect from the one they intended, like ordering the army to build modern towns in an unrealistically short time in a backward area of a country that's just been a war zone, only to find that having so many people from their army there attracts a lot of the men they've just recently been fighting, who resent them being there and want to fight them some more, for control of the area, so it just descends into a hopeless war zone all over again!
"You would have thought the politicians who come up with those ideas would think, 'Let's think about what could go wrong with this idea, and if we can think of things, let's plan how we might prevent them from happening, or let's come up with a different idea altogether!'
"And it's the same with other things: It's odd how some governments like to talk about fighting wars even when they're not talking about real wars. And it's funny what they call wars sometimes; like I've heard politicians started a 'war on drugs' and a 'war on poverty'; but I think that since then, both drug crime and poverty have Increased a lot! I heard a funny quote from someone once, that said something like,
"'Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use? It would be nice to rank as the best in education instead, but we can fix that. All we need to do is start the war on education. If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics.'"
One student joked, "Yeah, maybe they ought to start wars on things they really want people to do or have more of. What about 'the war on vegetables!' They could put big posters up in public places saying things like, 'Just say no to vegetables!' and, 'Vegetables kill!' and 'If someone offers your child a vegetable, report them to the police immediately!'
"Then maybe people would think they must be exciting and want more of them: Maybe teenagers would have secret vegetable-eating sessions with their friends when their parents were out, and their younger brothers and sisters would be begging them to give them some. And every night around the coasts, heaps of vegetables would be smuggled into this country and sold in secret. And kids who used to refuse to eat vegetables might raid their parents' stock of vegetables in the middle of the night and eat them as quietly as they could under their covers!"
"Hopefully raw!" said another student with a grin. "Otherwise, imagine people trying to smuggle a little cooker and saucepans full of water and a chopping board and plates and knives and forks under their bedclothes to cook them!"
The students giggled. Then another one joked, "And how about if politicians started the 'war on peace'! Maybe then there would never be war again!"
One said, "No, they'd better not. Knowing our luck, that would be the one war they started that would actually succeed!"
They thought that was quite possibly true and made cringing faces.
Then one of the group said, "You know, the other day I was listening to the start of this programme on the radio that was supposed to be about why relations aren't very good between Russia and the West nowadays. It wasn't very informative, mainly because the presenter didn't ask the interviewees very good questions! And at the beginning of it, she said something like, 'Not long ago, on a lovely warm day when the sun was shining, the president of Russia came to visit the queen. Now, the skies are grey and it's raining, and relations have soured between Russia and the West.'
"I thought, 'What a daft thing to say! You make it sound as if you're engaging in some kind of magical thinking, where you believe the weather controls relations between countries, so they get worse when it rains!'
"Mind you, can you imagine what things would be like if that really did happen? Imagine if there was a summit between European leaders, and on the first day, the sun was shining, and they were all getting on really well together, and then early the next morning it started raining and carried on all day, and they all argued, and then one said to the others, 'I don't understand it; we were all getting on so well yesterday! What can have happened?' And another one said, 'I don't understand it either; but for some reason, I woke up this morning thinking I don't like you all! And whereas I was all for greater European integration yesterday, for some reason, today, I'm convinced the best policy is for my country to have as little to do with yours as possible!'
"And then imagine if the next day, the sun came out again, and they suddenly all liked each other again, and wanted their countries to have more friendly relations with each other.
"Or imagine if two countries were about to go to war, and there was a radio programme where there was a panel of experts who were all asked to give their opinions on how the war could be prevented, and they all said, 'What we need is more sunshine! That would solve the problem!'"
The students giggled.
Then one said, "I think sunshine does cheer people up though."
The one who'd been joking said, "Oh yes, I think it does. But if the effect was that powerful, all the hot countries would be peaceful, and everyone in them would get on well with each other, and that's obviously not happening!"
Becky said, "Imagine if the leaders of countries started arguing so much we all began to think another world war must be coming soon, and then one day someone tried to sell you a calendar, and you said, 'No, I don't think there's any point; it probably won't have the really important dates on it, like what date the nuclear winter's going to start, or what day the world's going to end.'"
Another one of the group said, "Imagine if one country nuked another one, and no one else understood why, since there hadn't been any hostility between those countries before then, so the leaders of the country that nuked the other one were asked why, and they said, 'Well, we spent ages developing those nukes, and they cost us loads of money, and then they were just sitting around doing nothing for ages, and it just seemed a shame to waste them! So we decided to use them on someone, in case technology moved on and nukes started becoming obsolete before we'd have a chance to.'"
One of the students grinned and said, "They'd probably be the kind of people who'd tell their children to eat everything on their dinner plates because it would be ungrateful not to, considering some people in the world have to go hungry. Imagine if the leader made an announcement that said, 'Just as I'm trying to teach my children to be fine upstanding citizens who don't waste their food, I wanted to instil in our military the moral lesson of not wasting things by insisting they didn't waste our nukes!'"
The students giggled, and one said, "That's gross!"
Then one said with a grin, "I heard some people being interviewed on the radio about what makes for good peace negotiations once. I can't remember much about what they said, but there was something that made me laugh a bit: One of the people being interviewed was a woman who'd taken part in peace negotiations in different countries around the world for years. About halfway through the interview, she started talking about how she'd helped to mediate between two sides who'd been fighting in some country in Latin America, and she started talking with a Spanish-type accent, but I was sure she hadn't had one at first! I thought, 'Hang on, I'm sure you just had an ordinary English accent before!'
"Then I started imagining what it would be like if she kept changing her accent to the accent of the country she was talking about, so when they came round to asking her a question again, she might say, 'Well let me tell you about my time helping to negotiate with the IRA in Northern Ireland', and suddenly she had a Northern Irish accent; and then a bit later on in the interview she started talking about her time trying to mediate between India and Pakistan in a war they had years ago, and suddenly she had an Indian accent; and then a bit later she started talking about how she'd once helped both sides in negotiations in Nigeria, and suddenly she had a Nigerian accent. People would get a bit confused, wouldn't they, wondering if it was really the same person! Or they might think, 'You don't have to speak in the same accent as people in the country you're talking about, you know, you twit!'"
The students laughed.
But then the mood turned a bit gloomy again, when Mark, who it turned out hadn't anywhere near finished his melancholy rant, said:
"It must be hard work for some peace negotiators, especially if one or both sides aren't really interested in peace! I read that the only time when both sides are really likely to want to find a peaceful solution to a conflict is if there's a stalemate between them, where no side is winning, but the war's costing them both a lot; if one or both sides thinks they can win an easy victory, they probably won't want to give things up by making compromises with the other side, even if it would mean the lives of some of their people would be saved.
"And it's been claimed that before wars, politicians often tell outright lies to try to increase support among the public for the war they want to start, and also lie to fellow politicians who have to vote on whether they should get to do what they want - telling lies such as insisting that the people they want to fight are more of a threat than they really are. And a lot of journalists just report what the politicians say, instead of suspecting it's not true and investigating it, and challenging the politicians with any evidence they find that contradicts them. So they often end up just giving more publicity to the propaganda the politicians and their cronies have invented to get the public on their side, instead of telling the public things that would help them make better judgments about what to think.
"But I wonder if politicians wouldn't be so enthusiastic to back war if there was a rule that they had to watch hard-hitting documentaries about the effects of recent wars on civilians before they were allowed to vote on whether or not to send people to war.
"... Anyway, I've been getting sidetracked! "
"That was a very long side-track!" interrupted one student with a smile.
"Yes, I suppose it was," said Mark, blushing slightly.
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