I have spent most of my life with the nagging, unspoken, often unacknowledged, fear of nuclear bombs as theme music, harsh and clammering in the background of every thing I knew.
I was taught to duck and cover, and remember examining the hole in the shoe of the girl under her desk, in front of me.
I watched neighbors build air raid shelters in suburban back yards, fitted with primitive air exchangers and 40 gallons of water.
I have raised children in a world that I was not sure would still exist tomorrow.
I was sent by my military officer husband deep into the middle of nowhere just before the Cuban missel crisis was made public knowledge, with a cryptic phone call at 5am.
I followed the struggle to use MAD as a barganing chip to keep the world from destroying itself while truly mad men ran an ever expanding race to out produce one another and create a stockpile of bombs that would have shattered the planet.
Then I saw the madness begin to receed.
I saw the instillation of the "red phone" which would allow leaders to contact each other to avoid a nuclear mistake.
I saw rational leaders recognize their own self interest lay in getting control of the monster they had created. They begin to talk to one and other of how they might reduce their stock piles, put in place mechanisms that could avoid an unintentional detonation of a bomb, and finally agree that destroying their own nations at the whim of defense contractors, and the next Doctor Strangelove, was insane.
I began to relax, for the first time in my life. Relax from a level of tension I never knew I possesed. I began to have hope for the human race. I began to believe that my grand children, and great grandchildren, might live. I began to focus on the future.
I didn't realize that this driving theme in my life had receeded until I awoke this morning with the old terrors gnawing at my spirit. I didn't know how the drip, drip, drip, of real fear could shape and control my thinking and actions, until that fear once again overwhelmed me with it's nausea, and tension.
I don't want to live that way again!
I don't want to pretend that some magical Star Wars is what stands between me and the end of my genetic line. I don't want to return to a world whose survival depends on mad men finding sanity. A world where threat and posture, upping the ante and finally proving who is the tougher shapes the future for us all.
I don't trust the men who determine the next step. They have failed in everything they have done, to date. Why should the future of the world be a negotiating chip in the power plays of small minds and big egos? We did that once. I don't want to do that again!
I am frightend this morning. 9/11 made me angry. The invasion of Iraq made me sad. Bin Laden made me furious. But, nothing in the past 10 years has really frightened me, in spite of attempts to control me through fear.
This morning I am frightened.