So, When I was a kid it was all about the Cold War. I think that was the first political reality

that I ever had explained to me. I didn't even have explained to me. I come to think of it, I felt

it. I think we all felt the Cold War back then. We knew there was a big violent

dangerous enemy with weapons harnessed the power of the sun and could melt us all

and we never really heard from them or knew what they were mad about exactly but they were dangerous

I mean it was in our media it was in our storytelling it was in our schools I mean I remember doing the drills

where we would get under the desk because apparently an eighth of an inch of

formica glued to a half inch of particle board will save you from a nuclear

blast but we did it

to my credit my mom and dad I think did a lot to blunt that fear tone but still if you grew up in the 80s you were

saturated in that but as bad as it was we all prayed that it would not go hot. Whatever. Hot war, Cold War, that's the deal. How was the Cold War fought? Well, I watched it unfold in slow motion, and it seemed like not much it really anything ever happened it was

not a lot of bullets or anything at least not fired directly between the two

parties there were proxy wars I remember fights and squabbles with a team that we backed and a team that they

backed in parts of the world that if you've picked up a globe you would never guess that

would be the part of the world that people would need to fight over but that's

sort of how it was played and spies James Bond stuff and undermining and

manipulation and misinformation and despair campaigns those seem to be the tools of the trade, the way that

fight was fought.

And that's very different than a hot war where maybe you try all that other stuff first,

but then eventually you just get weapons and you fight each other.

In a way I feel like that's the evolution of tension that we're getting here in the book of Nehemiah

between the enemies of the rebuilding and the people who are

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