Midlife Meditation

Mid-twentieth century students practicing for the apocalypse. No, I'm not that  old. Duck and cover drills ended before I started school. I did get a heavy dose of "Your Chance to Live" lessons, courtesy of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (formerly the Office of Civil Defense), during my middle school years. This lessons took the forms of films and filmstrips about a variety of disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods and, yes, nuclear war, the existence of which made the whole series necessary. Curiously, I don't remember any of those lessons taking place once I started high school, which leads me to wonder if having them be such a large part of public school was just an Idaho thing. (My family moved to Oregon the summer before my freshman year.) Whatever the reason for exposing impressionable young students to so many ways we could all die, the result was probably not what the preparers of the curriculum intended. Being prepared didn't...

Did that get your attention? I was born in 1961. That put me in diapers during the Cuban missile crisis, in grade school through most of the Vietnam War, and in junior high during the "Your Chance to Live" emergency preparedness campaign. This seemingly endless series of film strips and short films presented arresting stories of survival in a variety of natural disasters, as well as, with the help of stock footage and dramatizations, of how to survive a nuclear attack. These lessons were powerful, terrifying, and largely pointless for the geographic region in which I was living at the time: Idaho, a state rarely experiencing any weather-related disasters or earthquakes, and probably toward the bottom of likely American targets for a missile attack. Regardless, we all sat and watched in shocked silence as one force of nature or war after another destroyed homes and lives. We never had a "duck and cover" drill, but we all knew which buildings in town were certifie...