More missiles, memes, and the new resistance

There was a time, not so long ago, when Walter Cronkite’s sombre baritone could turn battlefield dispatches into moments of collective reckoning.

- Imran Khalid

Even the first “television war” of 1991, piped in grainy bursts from Baghdad, felt slow enough for shock to sink in. These days, the missiles that streak above Natanz or Esfahan arrive on TikTok between latte art tutorials and kittens sliding off sofas. The effect is less shock-and-awe, more scroll-and-shrug.

Last month’s US strikes on Iran's nuclear bunkers should have rattled nerves. Instead, much of Gen Z greeted the spectacle with an arched eyebrow and a sardonic playlist. One clip looped “Another One Bites the Dust” over orange fireballs; another labelled the bombardment “Just another Tuesday” before pivoting to a dance challenge. Outrage, it seems, has gone the way of MySpace.

Call it apathy if you like — I’d call it adaptation. This generation has been weaned on crisis: melting ice caps, school lockdown drills, pandemic graphs, brittle democracies. Catastrophe is no longer an interruption; it is the operating system. So when Washington crossed a carefully drawn red line in Iran, young viewers simply filed the incident alongside all the other background errors in the global code.