This week, my 14-year-old child asked me if we were going to war. She said, “You’re a political scientist, right? Like, do you think it will be World War III?” I received variants of this question from my other child as well as my students — so the young people in my life are worried about war.

My first response to all of them was something pithy along the lines of, “I’m sorry, I am an American politics scholar, so what happens between countries far away is really not my area of expertise,” which didn’t help address their worry and was a total cop out. After I said I wasn’t the right political scientist to ask, I said that my whole life Russia was the big bad, the boss we were ultimately fighting against. I remember going to the gym as part of civic defense drills. We used to laugh, as middle schoolers do, about who might be attacking, as if the Soviet Union were going to blow up Rotterdam, New York. But we’d file down to the gym, interrupting learning, and stand there for some predetermined amount of time. If I walked into that middle school today, I could find my spot immediately. Every reference in popular culture in the 1980s had the Soviet Union as the villain. Every conspiracy theory ended in Moscow. It was very easy to fear them. It was very easy to hate them.

I was in 10th grade when the Berlin Wall came down, and my social studies class celebrated because we had won. The United States had emerged victorious over the authoritarian regime that had dominated world politics for decades. I was sure the world was a better place. I believed President Bush when he said there were a thousand points of light. I even changed my major in college because I didn’t think anything bad would really ever happen again, so being a journalist who traveled the world covering war was maybe not a viable career path.

But, here we are again. The headlines from today’s papers read just like 1988. And young people are asking the grown ups, “Do you think it will be World War III?” As it turns out, humanity learned nothing. We are still having the same stupid conversation. And we are still wondering whether we all love our children enough to not blow each other up.

On the one hand, I wonder if maybe it’s a good thing to have Russia decide to invade Ukraine and blame the United States. Remember how easy it was to hate them? This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States was goading Russia into a conflict, and my first thought was that Russia is amassing troops along the border and somehow that’s the United States’ fault? Then I wondered how many of us in the country would agree with me, and I bet it’s a lot. So maybe Russia being the big bad again will cause the United States to stop eating its own for a bit as we turn our gaze to an external foe. That might be nice — to not hate Americans and hate someone else.

On the other hand, the young people who have been asking me questions are all of the age that if the United States decided to rise to the bait of Russia’s saber-rattling, and we needed to draft some people to fight to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty, they’d be the ones going. A student compared selective service to slavery in a conversation about a possible war. They argued about whether we are supposed to care about Russia and Ukraine. They are as exhausted by having lived an entire life fighting a war in Afghanistan that they can’t explain as I was by civil defense drills and as my father was by a draft for the Vietnam War.

It’s happening again because we are not trying hard enough. Generations of having the same stupid conversation. We should all love our children more than we love to go to war. We should all love our children enough to say to them, “Of course there will not be World War III,” because we will not let it happen.

Dr. Leah Murray is a Brady Distinguished Presidential Professor of Political Science and the academic director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University.

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