Waking up to images on my television of what may be the opening salvo of World War III.
As a child of the cold war, the same age as the child in the iconic "daisy ad", with the mushroom cloud exploding as she picked flowers in a field (see video link in comment below), my generation grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.
Seeing Russian tanks move into Ukraine this morning is what you might call a trigger. Air raid sirens that blared as drills in my childhood. I was a tad too young to have experienced "duck and cover" drills... but just the tiniest tad. The older cohort of my same generation did. As if getting under a wooden desk would protect you from nuclear war.
My attention shifted from nuclear war to climate change over the years, but you know what? Nuclear weapons never went away. The cold war may have unofficially ended yet the weapons remain. And the worst potentials--just like the best potentials--within humankind remain. There's a Native American parable that's message is: "it depends which wolf you feed". We should choose our loving wolves. But this morning, the images on my television are not of that.
This could be what those long ago air raid siren drills, which always made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, were warning about. If so, no wooden desks will protect us.
"The Daisy Ad", from 1964
