While traveling last week, I started reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One. In the early chapters, he weaves accounts of his early days in NYC and recollections from his childhood. His words were particularly poignant in one excerpt, where he recalls Cold War era grade school air-raid drills:
"It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real. There were lots of folks around who took this threat seriously, though, and it rubbed off on you. It was easy to become a victim of their strange fantasy. I had the same teachers in school that my mother did. They were young in her time and elderly in mine. In American history class, we were taught that commies couldn't destroy America with guns or bombs alone, that they would have to destroy the Constitution - the document that this country was founded upon. It didn't make any difference, though. When the drill sirens went off, you had to lay under your desk face down, not a muscle quivering and not make any noise."
"It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real. There were lots of folks around who took this threat seriously, though, and it rubbed off on you. It was easy to become a victim of their strange fantasy. I had the same teachers in school that my mother did. They were young in her time and elderly in mine. In American history class, we were taught that commies couldn't destroy America with guns or bombs alone, that they would have to destroy the Constitution - the document that this country was founded upon. It didn't make any difference, though. When the drill sirens went off, you had to lay under your desk face down, not a muscle quivering and not make any noise."
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