Why Make Calendars?

Lauren Kelley is the online political editor for Rolling Stone.

I’m not, but I’m opinionated and getting less shy by the day.

Which in turn got me to thinking. (I hate it when that happens sometimes.)

I grew up during the Cold War. I remember having “duck & cover” drills so we would know what to do in case of a nuclear attack on Kansas City. (I didn’t write the rules, I just had to live by them. I was seven.) We had D&C drills more often than we had fire drills.

But being seven or eight years old, I wasn’t terrified or worried. We had tornado drills as well, and I had seen them. That will scare the shit out of you! (In a good way to a certain extent. I still think that thunderstorms and extreme weather is pretty cool, so long as we’re not actually getting killed or destroyed by it.)

Tornadoes were real. Fires were real. Nuclear attacks, not so much.

But looking back on it now and having done some research and reading to get the point of view of an adult of the era, I wonder if my parents were as worried and stressed about it as I am about our current situation.

It’s too late to ask them now, but I suspect that we might be a bit more on edge than they were. Why? Just look at who was in charge then and now.

They had Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. We have Trump.

They had faith in their leaders. They believed that their leaders had the best interest of the country and the world in mind. They trusted their leaders.

We have no such faith. We know that our leaders (and not just Trump, but the whole crowd of billionaires and sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, plus all of the assclowns in Congress) care for absolutely nothing other than lining their own pockets and making sure they get re-elected so they can continue being “leaders.” We don’t trust our leaders to be able to not be felons or sexual predators.

In North Korea we have an egomaniacal,  unstable, and unpredictable dictator who has nukes and brags about how willing he is to use them if cornered or threatened. In this country we have an egomaniacal, unstable, and unpredictable SCROTUS who has nukes and has said that “all options are on the table.”

It’s no longer a case of who will blink first, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s now a case of who will flip out first. Not that it matters, we’ll all be royally fucked when it happens, no matter who pushes the first button.

Well, those of us still alive.