I know, I know....Nobody does a blog two days in a row but here I am anyway.
This morning I watched the CBS Sunday Morning Show and they did a piece on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It took me back to those days when I was a freshman at St. Hubert's and the real dread I lived in that October. But then I wasn't the only one living in fear. The entire nation was in the same boat.
We were watching shows like 'The Jetsons', 'The Lucy Show' and 'The Beverly Hillbillies' on TV. They were all brand new that fall. Shelly Fabres was singing 'Johnny Angel' and Acker Bilk was playing 'Stranger on the Shore'. People were going to the movies to see 'The Longest Day'.
I had to use Google to remind me of the TV and music and the movies of that year but I remember the fear on my own. I had nightmares for years about a sky full of planes heading south to defend us all. There was a real and palpable fear that the world could come to an end. Mine was the first generation who grew up under the cloud of nuclear war. We saw the power of what a single bomb could do in the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We went through bomb drills in school.
So many years later a touch of fear is still there. Not as bad as it once was but it hasn't completely gone away. The dream of all those planes does not come with the frequency it once did but it does show up every once in a while. When I see movies and TV shows that talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis I am reminded of that kernel of fear that resides in me and is mostly dormant now.
I think of the history I have seen since that long ago October. A president and his brother were assassinated and so was MLK. We lived through the hell of Viet Nam and the horror of 9/11. We have had embassies and consulates attacked and Americans killed all over the globe but we have not been as close to the precipice of total destruction as we were that October so long ago.
Thank God that cooler heads and diplomacy prevailed that October. Thank God that FEAR did not win.
Yes, so thankful for cooler heads and diplomacy. Very well put Maf
ReplyDeleteFinally I just caught up with this. I saw that piece on Sunday Morning, too and it set off memories. I was in 7th grade and we lived on a military base in Germany. You can well believe that we were on high alert during that time. It was so scary. Everything was locked down. We still had to go to school, but it was talked about in lots of our classes because so many people's fathers were either on alert or being sent other places. My father was a civilian teacher, but even he was assigned to be our apt. building's security guy. I was petrified by the whole thing and it wasn't till much later that we found out how many missles were in place and pointing toward Russia and ready to go. Gives me the shivers to think of, even now.
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