I had an epiphany last night about my generation and the mess this country has been steadily getting into. Put on your 3-D glasses, folks younger than 45. Then try to imagine....
You don't know it's happening to you. It all seems perfectly normal, albeit terrifying. Your parents don't protect you from it, because they were brainwashed, too, but in a different way. All this seems normal to them as well, and it never occurs to them to wonder what's happening to the minds of their children.
It's "The Stepford Wives" in reality. It's the Cold War.
Seven year old girl wakes up in screaming terror night after night, her young mind filled with images of the end of the world. At some level she figures she'll never grow up. Just recently she saw photos from Auschwitz that horrified her, but those images don't hold a candle to what she sees in her dreams.
Nor does the terror stop when she wakes up. She goes to school, and at least once a week she's told to duck and cover beneath her desk. At some point, as she gets a little older, she knows that desk isn't going to protect her. Then, as the schools face that shattering reality, they start moving students into the hallways and have them squat down with their faces against the wall, hands clasped over their necks. Fifteen minutes in hell, even though it's only a drill.
She knows things kids should't know, like the fact that she'd only have fifteen minutes of warning when the ICBMs come her way. She knows about the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning system made up of radar stations in the icy north of Canada and Alaska, about B-52s, armed with nuclear weapons, that are constantly in the air so that when it happens they can strike first. She knows terms like first strike, and Mutual Assured Destruction. And she learns them in school.
The seven-year-old is now ten, and finds herself wondering whether that little reinforced glass window in the fire door is any protection, and what will happen to her family and how she will ever find them again, and then she discovers books by Philip Wylie in the library, and a book on Hiroshima.
The terrifying shadow that looms over her every waking and sleeping minute drives her to read these books. The pictures and stories from Hiroshima are worse than her worst imaginings. But Philip Wylie says some of us will survive. (He's a civil defense director, so he passes out the myth, and even the myth ain't pretty.)
At ten, the girl decides she doesn't want to survive a nuclear war. Not after learning about Hiroshima, not after reading Philip Wylie's descriptions of the aftermath, even though by comparison they're positively cheerful.
So her young mind is drenched in terror, and that terror has a code name: The Red Menace. Because, you see, there has to be a reason for us to be so terrified. Hence we are taught to be suspicious of neighbors, teachers and even family members. Any one of them might be a subversive communist. When the little girl tries to write a letter to the Soviet Embassy to get research information for a school paper, her mother tears up the letter and throws it away because if the little girl writes to the embassy, her daddy's job could be lost.
She gets the message. No one can be trusted. Even the U.S. Mail could be an instrument of destruction. The mind control is complete. The government is always right. Your neighbor or your teacher could be your enemy, and any one of them could be working to make all your nightmares come true.
Duck and Cover. Report suspicious activity. And for God's sake don't think anything different, or if you do, don't say it aloud because you could be labeled a "commie."
Any remaining innocence gets thoroughly stomped out during the missile crisis in 1962 when your Dad suddenly starts digging a bomb shelter and your mom is laying in supplies that you, because you have read Philip Wylie, know won't do you a damn bit of good because guess what? Two weeks is not going to be enough. Ten years isn't going to be enough. Whenever you are forced to emerge from your molehole with your gun to defend against rampaging neighbors who used to be friends...the world will still be radioactively glowing, even if you can't see it.
Then two whispers of hope creep into your damaged mind: The Civil Rights Movement and the Red Phone. You all know about Dr. Martin Luther King and how he and his cohort changed the face of conflict in this country with peaceful resistance. But the red phone? Pictures of it adorn newsmagazines. It sits on President Kennedy's desk and is a direct line to Premier Kruschev in Moscow. The two men have vowed they will not bring us to the brink again.
Remember blinking when you emerged from darkness into bright sunlight? You can't really see... but everything looks a little different now.
Except you can't fully escape the way you've been taught all your life to think. You strike out against the nightmares, the way people do when they have PTSD, because your whole damn generation has PTSD. You strike out with the peace movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement.
You need to change your world. You need to create a counter-culture of hope. And for a while you do.
But the ingrained ways of thinking don't dissipate. You replace the Cold War with The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty. The War on Terrorism. Everything is perceived in terms of a life and death struggle that requires a WAR. You can't look at the world in any other terms.
You have been brainwashed, and most likely you don't even know it. That, to you, is the way the world is. So you elect presidents and congressmen who talk about national security and strength, you still cite the meme: the greatest country on earth, and it doesn't quite penetrate your damaged mind that we, the United States, have done a helluva lot of damage to the rest of the world in the name of National Security and The American Way of Life.
So now you have a choice of three candidates for the highest office in the land. Two speak in terms of fighting. Two are willing to threaten war. And then there's this crazy youngster who didn't grow up in the mindfucked generation who says, "HOPE." Who is willing to talk even to our enemies. Who wants to bring back all those dreams that you were fed as children along with the absolute promise that you'd never grow up to realize them. A crazy man who says we can be better, than we don't have to see everything in terms of black and white, a guy who wants to build bridges like that damn Red Telephone that offered the first wistful hope that we might not annihilate each other.
There is a generational disconnect in politics right now. A reason Obama appeals to the under 45 set. A reason some of us who are older reach out for that breath of hope, while too many of us simply think he's not realistic.
He's realistic, all right. But his realism is born of a world where the mindfucked don't rule, where reason and love are prized over fear. And too many of us Boomers and our parents are too damaged to reach out for it. We don't know how to perceive the world his way. Your way. The way of the young who didn't grow up under a mushroom cloud.
I cry when I hear the National Anthem. Not because I'm not patriotic, but because I realize how twisted we've become because we didn't know how to end a war. Because by the time WWII was over, there was only one way we knew how to think anymore, and we needed continuing conflict to control our people. Because a generation forgot, even though it once tried, how to dream of something better because they were too shackled by fear.
Those who benefited most from WWII were those who were defeated, in the sense of gaining perspective on war. They learned a powerful lesson and are determined not to repeat their mistakes. But we, the victors, learned a different lesson and perpetuated it.
I had an epiphany last night. I suddenly realized why things have been going to hell in this country for sixty years. It's high time we pass the torch to those who aren't crippled.
Take the flag back. Rediscover the dreams. Give hope to your children, not fear. Fight for that better future.
There's only one way to break this destructive mindset. And you know who can do it. You.