This Is What We Asked For

A call for war is a call for death.

I was really into Animorphs when I was little. You remember them. Those books with kids slowly turning into animals on the covers. They were about a group of teens who stumble onto an ongoing secret alien invasion and a crazy gadget that lets them turn into any animal they touch.

It’s pretty serviceable YA sci-fi, mostly notable for its forays into body horror and — this is key — how violent things get in a war. The series ran some 54 entries before finally culminating in a big blowout war with the alien invaders, and that’s where things got really interesting. The Animorph teens successfully repelled the invasion, but at huge personal cost. Not all of them made it out alive. Those who did were traumatized. A flash forward epilogue finds our now-grown heroes distant, disconnected and disillusioned, barreling forward into a new conflict none of them really have the energy for. 

It is a huge bummer of an ending, especially compared to, say, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, where everyone ends up married and named after each other. Fans let author K.A. Applegate know that they were unhappy with how things wrapped up. Here’s a (slightly spoilery) part of how she responded:

Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. … I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I’m a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I’d wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.

So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? …You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

If you’re mad at me because that’s what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad.

I woke up this morning to news that the Israeli government is notifying the Palestinian residents of northern Gaza — all 1.1 million of them — that they have 24 hours to get out. This notification comes too late for the Palestinian people who have already been exposed to the Israel Defense Force’s white phosphorus munitions, which “has wiped out entire families, erasing any trace of their existence from the Palestinian civil registry.” But even for the survivors, the IDF’s warning comes late. Where exactly are 1.1 million people supposed to go in 24 hours? Imagine you, with all your resources and working wifi and a car than runs and no bombs dropping around your neighborhood, had 24 hours to leave your country. Could you do it?