I was born in 1946 under the threat of nuclear annihilation. People born before August 6, 1945, lived through wars, depressions, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. Scary as those are, the total destruction of all life on earth because someone didn't like their breakfast can have a profound affect on a person's entire life. In fact, it can change an entire generation. That single event, while ending a war, changed everything.
While the changing culture served as a backdrop to my 70 journeys around the sun, I am not going to write about the cultural changes except in how I interacted with them and was shaped and molded by so much of it. The seemingly constant threat of widespread radiation, the music, the movies, the advent of television and other electronic advances, the environmental changes, the make love not war movement, the beats, the protesters, and so much more have created a very multifaceted lens through which I have seen the world. My intention is to look at it all over the next year or so.
This is strictly my story. When I was born, my family lived in Laguna Beach, California, an idyllic artsy town on the Pacific Ocean. I learned to walk on the beach. We lived there until I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade. Then we moved to Lancaster, California (with a shot stop in the Sierra Mountains). Lancaster was near Edwards Air Force Base, the home of the U2 and the beginnings of The Right Stuff. Early on, we were told that Edwards was a Russian bomb target, so when I started school at Monte Vista Elementary school in Lancaster, I was introduced to nuclear bomb drills.
I remember very clearly the "Duck and Cover" drills in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. For me, it was a very real reminder that we were all doomed, while other kids in the class thought it was a great break from normal classroom work. Did the people who thought up those drills really believe that we would be safe from death and destruction by ducking under a desk and covering the back of our necks when the BOMB hit? I don't even think I believed that back then. But, I don't want this to become a rant against the government, as it easily could. I guess I might have believed in my safety a little more if the actual description of the amount of destruction and how it would be accomplished did not accompany the instructions about how to do the drill right. The events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were big news in my early schooling, so I guess I just couldn't be fooled. The good news is that we are still here. The bad news is the threat has not passed. It is a good thing that there have been so many distractions along the way.
This sure wasn't the life depicted on early television sitcoms, but I will leave my relationship with television to another day.
Namaste
