So, my 5-year old son was taking a bath tonight while I was watching the President's Libya speech online. I had the sound turned up loud enough that he could sort of hear the speech, and after his bath he wanted to know what "all the noise was".
I explained the the President was telling everyone what he/we were doing in Libya, and why.
My son wanted to know what was happening and why, and of course every simplified answer I gave ("a man in Libya is being mean to people, and we're trying to stop him from being mean", etc) led to another question.
He kept persisting, and in my mental scramble to come up with an appropriate metaphor that he might understand, I ended up settling on...A Bug's Life.
I started by comparing Gadaffi to Hopper, the villainous grasshopper gang leader (voiced perfectly by Kevin Spacey). This lead to the Libyan people sitting in for the ant colony, and the U.S./NATO coalition portraying the circus bugs who come to help stop Hopper from being oppressing the ants.
I wasn't sure that it was clicking with my son until he paused for a minute and mentioned that "Hopper and the grasshoppers could fly", to which I responded, "That's right--and President Obama and our friends are stopping them from flying...we made a No Fly Zone", which seemed to make sense to him.
Not the greatest metaphor in the world, I know, but it was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment that a 5-year old could digest without scaring the crap out of him.
Dunno why I made this into a diary; it was just weighing heavily on my mind. I and my family are Jewish, but my cousin is married to a Libyan guy whose whole family still lives there, and we stayed with them for a few days while we were on vacation a couple of weeks back, so obviously the Libyan revolution was the bulk of what we talked about.