The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Right off the get-go here I want to declare I’m a Plague survivor.  Two vaccinations, three boosters, fairly careful the past two or three years (who can keep track anymore?).  But so far so good.  So imagine my dismay when our President comes out and warns us we might be on the verge of nuclear annihilation.  And you thought climate change was something to worry about.

I guess you don’t have to sweat Long Haul Covid, forget about long haul anything when they drop the Big One!  I was twelve years old, a snot-nosed kid in Georgia when the Cuban missile crisis was putting us on the brink of … Atomic War!  Neighbors were building fallout shelters, stocking them with food and water, guns and ammo, figuring, I guess, they’d survive the holocaust and kill the mutants who banged on their door.  My school was conducting ‘duck and cover’ drills.  You think ‘Active Shooter’ drills are messing up kids’ heads, try Dr. Strangelove on for size — as the real deal.

So okay, there’s always some kind of existential threat, some virus or asteroid or robot apocalypse, some unexpected menace, government overthrow, a new war, famine and drought, another ice age.  You could maybe get used to one of those … but all of them coming at you at once?  I don’t think so.  Maybe just pull the sheets over your head, call your boss and tell him you’re sick, turn off the TV, cancel the newspapers, avoid social media and imagine a happy place.  A place you once lived in but forgot how to find again.  A place where the sun shines and children play, a Shangri-la-la far from the maddening crowd.  Puppies romp and butterflies fly.  Laughter fills the air like puffy clouds and worries drop away and evaporate.  Does that place really exist, you ask?

If it does, you know how to find it. It’s not on your GPS, you won’t find it online, you can’t find it past a secret door the other side of your Closet of Anxieties.   You want to worry about the future, it isn’t there.  The future is the last place you want to look.  Try right here….

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Duck and Cover

I’m old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and old enough to remember nuclear drills where us 3rd graders in Georgia would crawl under our desks and close our eyes, you know, so the blast wouldn’t blind us. My neighbor built a bomb shelter and kept a gun by the door so those of us whose dads were too lazy to do the same could be shooed away when the radiation was bearing down. When I told my father about the gun, he muttered something obscene and said our neighbor was a horse’s ass.

I don’t know how much our generation was affected by the nuclear jitters of the time. Maybe not as much as some psychiatrists think. But there is something about the idea of annihilation that probably seeps into the cellular level. Nuclear winter, mushroom clouds, flesh burned off bodies, cancers, giant ants in the desert mutating, all the horrors of cheezy sci-fi movies and yeah, the real thing.

So when I hear the Senator from Idaho talking about how a war with Russia would be over PDQ, I wonder where he was back in the days of Assured Mutual Destruction. If he thinks maybe the Russkies forgot the code to their nuclear arsenal. And then Sen. Graham joins in with the additional commentary that if Putin ordered an all-out nuclear strike, the general next to him would put a bullet in his head. Ah, magical thinking from the boyz in charge. Calling Dr. Strangelove, calling Dr. Strangelove!

I don’t plan to build a bomb shelter. Just yet. But a few more saber rattling comments from the peanut brain gallery, I may reconsider.

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