My experience of taking cover was a generation earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I would have been ten. I think we were shown a movie or I am mixing up movies because I remember the vision of a bright flash. We must have been given hand outs that I read because when I got home I went down to the basement, more a cellar really, and explored our defence options. I then announced to my family at dinner that the best place to build a fallout shelter would be in back of the basement stairs and we needed to fill water bottles and move my mother’s canning there. I must get my pragmatism from my mother. As I still remember, all she said was “If there is nuclear war we are better off dead”.
Guns in school weren’t a worry then but I remember when I was in University the absolute shock of the Kent State Massacre, the idea that peacefully protesting students could be shot by their own National Guard. So many ways for the world to feel unsafe. Now the number one concern should be climate change, but instead we are being distracted by a man baby’s temper tantrums. Hiding under a desk may help during a franking inspired quake but will be of no use in the path of a tornado or wildfire. I hear parents planning their children’s futures and part of me wants to scream at them “What don’t you get about climate change? They don’t have a future.”
O those were the days….. 1959 on. I got under the desks. And was on ground zero in a certain October, in Cuba.
But no active shooter drills….back then.
My experience of taking cover was a generation earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I would have been ten. I think we were shown a movie or I am mixing up movies because I remember the vision of a bright flash. We must have been given hand outs that I read because when I got home I went down to the basement, more a cellar really, and explored our defence options. I then announced to my family at dinner that the best place to build a fallout shelter would be in back of the basement stairs and we needed to fill water bottles and move my mother’s canning there. I must get my pragmatism from my mother. As I still remember, all she said was “If there is nuclear war we are better off dead”.
Guns in school weren’t a worry then but I remember when I was in University the absolute shock of the Kent State Massacre, the idea that peacefully protesting students could be shot by their own National Guard. So many ways for the world to feel unsafe. Now the number one concern should be climate change, but instead we are being distracted by a man baby’s temper tantrums. Hiding under a desk may help during a franking inspired quake but will be of no use in the path of a tornado or wildfire. I hear parents planning their children’s futures and part of me wants to scream at them “What don’t you get about climate change? They don’t have a future.”
You're right, and that's so scary.