So You Don’t Have to Learn Chinese or Russian

I was watching Lioness when a scene between Joe and her daughter punched me in the face.

Her daughter asks why she does the job she does. Joe tells her about her grandfather, who came to America from the Dominican Republic when he was young. He turned 17 on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, and three days later he joined the Army.

Years later, when he was asked why he was willing to fight for a country he barely knew, his answer was that he had just learned English and wasn’t about to learn German or Japanese.

Then Joe tells her daughter why she does what she does.

“So you don’t have to learn Chinese or Russian.”

I have watched plenty of shows about the military and intelligence agencies, but I don’t remember a scene ever making me think about national security quite like that one did.

I think it’s because she made it personal in a way politicians never do. We hear about national security constantly, but most of us are thinking about something happening somewhere else. I don’t wake up wondering whether another country will someday have enough control over us to decide how we live, because I have never had to think that way.

Pearl Harbor made the threat impossible to ignore. There were planes in the sky, ships burning, and Americans being killed. Everybody knew we had been attacked.

We don’t live with threats that obvious anymore, and that’s exactly what makes them harder to take seriously.

Take what’s happening with Iran. It has lost major leaders and taken enormous military losses, and yet it keeps going. Reporting has pointed to Russia sending drone components, ammunition, and other military supplies to help Iran rebuild what it’s lost, and China remains the largest buyer of Iranian oil, which keeps money flowing into the country despite sanctions.

That’s what made the line from Lioness land the way it did for me. China and Russia aren’t sitting on the sidelines watching what happens between Iran and the United States. They have their own interests, and they’re going to protect those interests whether we like it or not.

It’s easy to forget that other countries are watching America the same way we watch them, looking for weaknesses and figuring out whether there’s an opening worth using. If they find one, I don’t know why we’d assume they wouldn’t take advantage of it.

That’s also, for me, what the border comes down to. That conversation usually turns into an argument about whether you like immigrants, which misses the point completely. I don’t care where somebody was born. I care whether we know who is coming into the country.

I want the people responsible for protecting this country to actually understand what our adversaries are doing, and I want Americans paying attention to what’s being done in our name.

I keep coming back to Joe’s daughter. She had no idea what her mother was dealing with every day. From where she stood, her mom had a job that kept her away from her family and made their lives harder. Then Joe told her why.

“So you don’t have to learn Chinese or Russian.”

It doesn’t feel like television anymore. It feels like it’s closer than we think.

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