Duck and Cover

When I was in elementary school back in the early sixties, we had weekly air raid drills. The bell would sound and we’d stream out of our classroom to sit cross-legged on the linoleum floor of the dark hallway in total silence, arms covering our heads. This was how we would survive a nuclear attack.

Of course it was comically absurd. Anyone even remotely familiar with what happened at Hiroshima or Nagasaki twenty years before knew it. Yet, our teachers, our parents, and the U.S. government made sure we bought in. Every adult in our world suspended reason to make us perform what they had to suspect was a pathetically ineffectual exercise.

Our magical thinking by proxy was never actually tested, but we definitely knew the drill. Maybe it made the grown-ups feel better, to give us kids the appearance of agency over our fate, because the exact way any of the grim possibilities afoot in the world actually unfold has always been anyone’s nightmare guess. I’m thinking that’s why they taught us how lucky we were to be us, the good guys, and not them, and why they kept us in the dark, with our mouths shut.