As the World Burns, I Read Stories to My Children
This is our moment, this is our time
As the world burns, I read stories to my children.
I read to them knowing that there will be no food tomorrow.
We sit in their room. I am in the reading chair. My youngest is on the bed. My oldest is at the art desk.
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I read a story I wrote for them. It's a story about fairies and the challenges women will face in a patriarchal world.
The family dog is one of the characters.
The fairies are based on them. The dog is their protector, he's based on me. He's also based on the real dog.
Their mother is in these stories too. She comes in whenever the universe needs to step in to save them. Their mother is the one who plucked them from the void and brought them to this doomed planet. It was an act of magic. I'm forever grateful.
I read and I try not to think of the burning world.
There's nothing I can do about it anyway.
I need these moments, these precious moments. I need to experience the brief, flickering instant when the spark of our lives burned together.
We sit together and share our mutual warmth.
We're like the pilot lights at the heart of distant stars.
Burning, burning, burning.
Outside, society crumbles. They're dismantling our food supply. Our laws are being pushed aside.
Will tomorrow be the day that the soldiers come? It seems inevitable now. They're finding reasons to arrest people. They're finding reasons to strip people of their humanity.
That's what they've always done.
So many.
No matter how many times we stop them, they always seem to return.
But I can't think about that now. I have a story to read. I want to tell my girls about a life of happiness and potential and future prosperity. I want to prepare them for every obstacle they might encounter. I want to give them the means to navigate the rough waters that might rise up in their minds.
Rough waters.
Perhaps to stop the burning world.
Let those waves churn. Let the sea roil. Let the heavens open up and bring the cooling rain.
Let's hope.
But not now. Right now, I don't have the strength for hope. Entertaining hope would make the fear too real. I must forget about it all.
Instead, I'll think about the comfortable chair. I got this chair specifically to install in my daughter's room so I could read to them.
I got this chair for this moment.
My voice is strong. My breathing is calm. I give the characters voices. If I forget the voices, my daughters tell me.
“Daddy, that's not how the Pirate Captain talks.”
So I go back and read it again, right this time, as the girls deserve.
An easy reset. An easy reset. An easy reset.
Were that all resets were so easy.
Am I being irresponsible to savor this moment. Should I be raging at fate for conspiring to destroy the world on my watch?
No, no, no.
That's useless.
The precious thing is this, our time together. This time. This moment. Hold it. Recognize it. Appreciate it. Experience it.
My daughters love the stories.
I love telling them.
Outside the window, the world burns. The future is evaporating. The oceans boil. The locusts come. We're doomed, doomed, doomed.
But we're doomed anyway.
We're mortal.
Time is short.
So while my spirit flickers in the prime of this brief life, I'll read to my daughters. We'll put our minds together in mutual imagination, all of us in the same fantasy world that doesn't exist. The characters are us. Our adventures are eternal.
Whether story or reality, it's a dream.
It's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream.
Outside is a nightmare.
Perhaps we only need to awaken, and enter the better world, the more beautiful world.
The world we've been promised.
Until then, you can't neglect whatever floating fragments of dream you might find.
Touch them like a rainbow.
Hold them close, like children, like flames, like flickering embers that might erupt into a blazing light.
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It is. All I want is more time with them.
Breaking the Spell: what fairytales tell us about authoritarianism
In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim argued that fairytales are vital to psychological development because they allow children to work through unconscious fears — abandonment, chaos, evil — in symbolic form. The ogres, witches, and dark forests aren’t just fantasy. They’re metaphors for very real human fears: powerlessness, cruelty, betrayal, and the loss of moral order.
Now look at America today.
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Enter the Modern Ogre
Trump, to many, represents the return of the authoritarian strongman — the ogre who feeds on lies, divides families, hoards gold, and burns the village. Like the villains in classic tales, he appears invincible at first, supported by blind loyalty and dark magic (or in this case, dark money, disinformation, and judicial capture).
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Symbolic Parallels
• The Kingdom in Disarray: Just like in fairytales where the king is corrupt or asleep and the land suffers, America feels increasingly lawless and disordered under Trump’s influence. Institutions are weakening. Truth is warped. The climate burns.
• The Bewitched Citizenry: Bettelheim wrote that children need to confront stories where good and evil are stark — because moral clarity helps them navigate confusion. Today, millions seem caught in a spell, unable or unwilling to see the threat Trump poses, even as their freedoms erode.
The Hero’s Journey: In classic tales, the powerless rise — not because they’re perfect, but because they refuse to give up. We need that fairytale courage now: ordinary people defying a tyrant, reclaiming the narrative.
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Why This Matters
Bettelheim believed that fairytales teach us to endure despair, to believe that even in the darkest forests, there’s a way out — if we stay brave, hold to truth, and refuse to surrender to fear.
We’re in that forest now.