The Fallout of Childhood Memories

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

This is how I grew up, with "fallout drills", until I got into a school system with small out-buildings. I think they realized by then ducking under a desk in a prefabricated class room was fairly moot. I actually thought a newspaper covering my head would keep me from being burned.

There is some really creepy pedo shit in there as well. And a lot of "obey the older people" advice, as if they would not be insanely running in circles during such ordeals.

We were typing earlier in the month about how we perceived each other (East and West) as 'good guys vs bad guys'. Too many of you are too young (shakes fist!) to remember growing up in the early 60's, but some may be able to contribute their home countries propaganda-inspired Bert the Turtle.

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Speaking of, I just finished reading "Alas, Babylon" last night. Read it in one sitting since it's real easy to read. I was sort of amused at how un-dark the dark fiction was of the 50s. There's still that annoying faith in white government and white America, and white men with guns will get everything fixed up right proper. As if society just had a little hiccup or something.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I wonder why there weren't any far right "survivalist" types back then though. The threat of nuclear war seemed such a preoccupation of the time.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I think it pre-dated a modern cynicism of government and they still believed things would work out in the end, somehow. The Civil Defense wasn't so much a joke back then, they still believed in it. The 60s and Vietnam probably shook a lot of people's faith in stuff, and the old "Father Figure White Man Who Saves The Day" lost its cultural cache as a serious solution to the problem of post-apocalyptic survival.

But that's just my personal half-assed theory.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think The Day After opened up a lot of American's eyes to how futile any attempts by the government would be in protecting its citizens, with the President making a speech about "victory over the enemy" while the country was a file of ash.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Eh, the cynicism was always there. It was more that one did not say in polite society then what people say all the time now, primarily because one had to really seek out one's fellow crazy-ass motherfuckers. Nowadays the Birds of a Feather Flock Together with much greater ease and create self-reinforcing crazy-ass motherfucker feedback loops.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

I imagine you could find quite a few old buried bomb shelters if you dug up enough backyards. It was a money making business during the late 50s.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

We discovered one under my college. It was full of '60s-era provisions, and had these double-thick doors with no windows, a bunch of cots in one corner, all folded up... kinda freaky.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

There were to some degree...you hear stories of people in the early 60s building bomb shelters in their backyard. But it didn't really come to the fore until the late 80s/early 90s.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They were there. They were called the John Birch Society then. They just chose Tea Party as that sounds more contemporary-esque than JBS does.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they were pretty small though, and were considered to be extremely loony ( and formed in 1958, pretty late in the 1950s).

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

They were considered mainstream back then. They didn't need to hide out in Oregon. They strutted their stuff on Main Street.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Really?

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Yeah. My dad was one of them.

They were called The White Men™

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

I read that, shortly after it came out. Strangely enough, I looked up a brief summary, and was surprised at how much of the details I started to remember.

At any rate, Reading dark fiction from the 50s now is a whole lot different than reading it then, heck a lot of stuff I remember as awesome (thinking of SF and fantasy movies in particular) back then I find a lot more than amusing. What? the new Steve Reeves "Hercules" movie is out. Where am I going to get 35 cents to go see it????" (you could get 3 candy bars for a dime at the Sav-On and a 5 cent ice cream cone after the movie, so for 2 weeks allowance you could have a killer day.....the 50's were good for something :D

Back on track: Compare the original Fly with the remake. The original was cheesy and unscary by today's standards, but "help me" in a high pitched voice can still ellecit chills. Context is all!

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

For me it was Elvis movies at our local theater in '65-'66.

Hots dogs were a quarter. Fountain drinks were .10 all you can drink if you were nice to the concession girl.

I also remember watching Muenster Go Home there at the Texan Theater in Mesquite, TX.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Well, by the early 80s, when my school memories start, although every school I went to still had a fallout shelter (my elementary schools had it in a weird sort of attic on the first floor, and in the basement boiler room, respectively, whereas my middle school, built in 1961, was an entire fallout shelter unto itself) they were never spoken of, and we never did any drills or talked about nuclear war (I had to ask my mom what a fallout shelter was).

Tornado drills were the stuff of Kansas childhood, in which we'd go out into the halls en masse during a drill (generally conducted once a month), kneel down facing the walls, heads down as far as they could go, covering the backs of our necks with our hands because, as Teacher said, this would protect our "brains" from flying debris in the event a tornado hit the school (the fact that, if one really did hit, all of us lined up in the hallways would be the flying debris was not, for some reason, discussed).

What we had was Stranger Danger, the idea that every single non-familiar adult was a pedophile kidnapper with razor-infused candy. This was reinforced by multiple visits from police officers, speeches by teachers and administrators, and various grainy poor-quality VHS recordings. These scary lessons might include such gems as (some helpfully listed by Wikipedia, and all of them remembered from my own childhood):

"Don't talk to strangers"
"Don't tell anyone your name"
"Don't let strangers touch you"
"Don't let strangers give your food or drink"
"Don't let strangers take pictures of you"
"Don't help strangers"
"If someone acts too friendly in a theater, complain to an usher or the manager"

(Yes, I actually heard the theater one. lol) Now, the funny thing is, they never flat-out told us that the Stranger Danger consisted primarily, at the time, of being sexually molested; they couched this in terms of "bad touch" "too friendly" and "if it feels funny..." and it was all fairly useless drivel, considering the fact that, even in the heady 80s, most abuse was committed by adults familiar with the victim.

[brockulfsen.livejournal.com]

But look at the attitude it was attempting to instill.

Only in (home/)School/Church can you be anything but guarded and vigilant.


Only in (home/)School/Church can you be Safe.


And by inference, if they aren't a stranger, if it is Uncle Bob, Neighbour Sam, Pastor Bill or that nice Coach Smith, then it must be OK.

Why, yes, I am a cynical bastard.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I was at early school in the 80s and I do remember some instructions about potential nuke attacks, but there was no drills. Just some lessons about ducking, some visits to the town's bomb shelters and we were taught how to use masks.

Those evil Americans never showed up.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Our badass army is ready to kick some snowman ass!



They're coming!

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

I can't see the picture. Is your army made of ninjas?

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I can see it all right.

Ninjas, absolutely! They'll steal your tyres while you're waiting at the traffic lights!

[kinvore.livejournal.com]

I remember growing up in the 80s filled with fear over nuclear annihilation. I mean it was an outright obsession with me. I remember thinking that it was inevitable, and that I hoped I could be vaporized immediately rather than dying slowly to radiation sickness in the aftermath. Did I mention I was like 12 years old when possessed by these morbid thoughts? Haha.

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

Back in my day, there was nothing worse than being in one part of the house, and suddenly hearing the EBS signal blaring from the TV.

You just never knew until you ran in to the TV room to see if it was 'this was only a test' or 'an actual emergency'. I never wanted the TV to be off "just in case"

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

I remember spending my childhood in blissful ignorance about the big imaginary wars that the Big Powers were threatening each other with. Of course we lived at the benevolent mercy of our big brother America and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization so the evil Russians stayed away from us... For the most part. Except that Spassky guy. =)

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

I went to school in Wisconsin for a short time about 15 years ago. We didn't have "fallout drills" but we had tornado drills. To this day I still can't understand how lining up against a hallway wall with my fellow 7th graders and ducking down with my head between my legs is supposed to save me from a tornado. Really, all it did was give me extra time to consider which teachers deserved a house dropped on them. (kidding!)

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

In all fairness, if hit by a regular (kiloton) nuke of the time as opposed to a high-yield (megaton)nuke, there was a reasonable chance of survival. The silliness came about when they kept the policy long after high-yield nuclear weapons were deployed, which is one reason why we no longer bother. Another is that the population is much higher than it was mid-century, so there is no realistic way to evacuate metropolitan areas, no less feed the evacuees if we could.

This is one reason why we need to focus our resources on intelligence gathering and situation avoidance rather than mitigation.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

See I grew up when the fall of the USSR was a done deal (which incidentally is where my interest in Soviet history came from), and when Operation Desert Storm meant the USA was back to admiring the army and assuming victory in war was a given. I at least don't remember the wackadoodle fear-mongering cartoons then, it was after 9/11 that the Grimdark at least became notable. Maybe that's nostalgia filter and had more to do with the reality that my hearing aids weren't good enough for me to understand TV anyway (which is why I spent much of my earliest time on the Internet puttering around the Godzilla fandom but wound up joining an alternate history forum as my first forum). I'm sure it was there in the 1990s but I just missed it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And where nuclear war is concerned, it's worth noting that the Yellowstone Supervolcano will at some point in the future send more ash into the atmosphere than the worst nuclear winter scenario and will swallow up some of the most productive and vital food-agricultural regions in the world in a fashion sufficient to cause the death of 1 billion people in one year and more in the immediate years following. Even when there were two superpowers, both with tens of thousands of atomic weapons and both with plans to slaughter the entire human population of the globe if something had gone wrong (or alternately if someone misjudged a computer glitch) the total damage from fallout and nuclear winter would still be less than the Yellowstone volcano.

Ironically, too, hindsight has shown that the USSR finally developed parity and briefly superiority in terms of atomic weaponry with the USA....right when its collapse began. It's history's greatest shaggy-dog story. More ironically the attempts to make the Middle Eastern version of the Army of God and survivalist nuts into Ersatz Communists isn't working very well because the terrorists realistically can't even take over countries in collapse while the Communists made that into an art form.

Most savagely ironic is that as I remember it when I grew up the USA was proud our military badassery had recovered....by beating an army that had to use mustard gas to kill teenagers running over minefields repeatedly to stave off complete and total disaster. That's like beating the Keystone Kops and saying that makes you badass. I also remember vaguely people disliking that we never deposed Saddam, and then in 2003 I remember that when we really did depose him the people who argued this was a bad idea in 1991 were proven right the first time.

Most ironic in general, however, is the chronological irony that my father was born the month before Churchill gave the Iron Curtain Speech (leaving aside that genocidal bastard had signed a Percentages Agreement and thus wasn't too bothered about that until it was a means to get his position as PM back) and I was born a month before the Berlin Wall fell.

From the 1960s

[russj.livejournal.com]

I attended grade school in Utah in the 1960s, so I qualify as a 'down-winder'. The USA was still conducting above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada, and I remember hearing several announcements that we were NOT to eat the snow for the next few days, because it might contain radiation from a recent test.

We had a neighborhood fallout shelter in the basement of our school, and we held regular drills. We were never told to hide under our desks, as in the cartoon above.

I was always amused to see that there were about six boxes of 'survival crackers' neatly stacked in a corner. I wonder if those crackers are still there...

[vuniper.livejournal.com]

I am happy they gave you "snow" warnings and "survival crackers" least your training as a child was better than a desk. ~ *Quite amused* ~ Who knows ... maybe ?

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

I remember duck and cover drills, but I never saw that video....I would have remembered it :D

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

California schools still do duck and cover drills for earthquake safety.

Here is an interesting video on Nike defenses against bombardment: