My Parents Just Had To Worry About The Great Depression And WWII
I sometimes wonder what life must have been like for my parents when they were young. Both born in 1923, they grew up in the Great Depression and came of age at the beginning of World War II. My Mother, being from Canada, saw her older brother and many if not most of her male classmates sent to Europe. My Father enlisted in in the wake of Pearl Harbor and was sent to the war in the Pacific. Between global war and a failed economy, they experienced a youth fraught with economic hardships and danger.
In spite of that, I envy them for a childhood and adolescence of relative innocence. For as great as the problems they had to encounter, they were never forced to contemplate a world-ending tragedy such as nuclear war or global warming. As terrible as the threats imposed by Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan, those threats were immediate, not permanent. A loss to Axis powers would have caused incalculable suffering, but the hope for a better future yet loomed somewhere beyond the horizon. A world inhabited by lions and pandas and birds would still exist, forests and pristine lakes would not be extinguished even by Nazis.
As children, my parents never practiced, as my older siblings did, what to do in case of a nuclear war. They never cowered beneath their desks in some vain hope of being protected. Neither they nor their neighbors dug bomb shelters and stocked them with provisions in case a nuclear war turned the earth around them radioactive. They were never instructed by their mother to get to their knees in prayer against all things ending as my siblings were instructed during the Cuban Missile Crisis
My parents never, as I did, watched films about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their youth. They never had the image of the outlines of incinerated bodies etched upon concrete etched into their minds. They were never privy to the footage of the slow death inflicted upon the survivors. They never saw an entire city flattened by a single bomb, the first and most merciful of its kind.
I will never forget the overwhelming dread I felt while watching this, worse even than when I was made to watch graphic footage of the Nazi death camps. It was not long after this that our teachers instructed us to go home that night and watch a movie called The Day After, a movie depicting what the effects of a nuclear war would be like. Because back then, people used to be worried about the dangers of a nuclear war. We had people protesting militarism, had actual peace movements and a sense that our government would listen to us if we only made enough noise. Incredible as it might seem, we even had political leaders that worked with other nations to create treaties which lessened the threat of nuclear war. It seems almost as innocent a time to me now as my parents’ generation was.
I wonder if children in school nowadays are shown the devastation that took place when atomic bombs were dropped on cities full of people. I wonder if their teachers still have the urgency and the permission to drive home the point of how serious this is. Judging from everybody I know, judging by how little this issue is discussed in media or elsewhere, I have to think it is not. Society has slipped into a very dangerous, one might say insane, amnesia about the danger of nuclear war. It has never gone away. It abated slightly with the fall of the Soviet Union but the powers that be did not take that time to further lessen the threat of nuclear war. Instead they took it as an opportunity to jockey for greater power in the void that resulted from the demise of the USSR.
We know now that our leaders will never work to end the world-ending threat as they once at least promised to. The very real threat has vanished from their minds because what we call leaders are nothing more than maintenance technicians for a machine that has run out of control. Perhaps never before in history have people been so in need of someone to lead them, but our leaders — like ourselves — are wrapped up in their illusions. We leave the fate of humanity in their hands nonetheless because we are too frightened to imagine that we have the power to confront such immense crises.
Though the threats we face are greater than those of the Greatest Generation, we need not think our sacrifices must be as great. For the love of God, all we need to do is to acknowledge the threats are both real and unacceptable for the battle to be half-won. We need to acknowledge our fear in order to overcome it. We need only to see things as they are and we will react naturally to what we see. Our bodies are inclined towards health and life and even love. We just have to feed them the truth and let them speak for the world.
No more fear.