FLYING HIGH
COVID-19 flying alongside children’s kids during the summer of 2020, made for a frightening time.
Frightening Times
A few days ago, a young woman asked me if the world was more frightening today than at any other time during my life. The question made me pause and reflect on how I dealt with the past eight decades.
The Cold War came to mind first, with nuclear annihilation on everyone’s tongue made me live under a cloud of fear that wouldn’t go away. An ideological and political rivalry between democracy and communism escalated at the end of the Second World War affecting the world. Counties had to choose sides. Winston Churchill’s 1956 speech chilled the world when he said that an iron curtain had descended. I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on until I married and moved to Boston to finish college. I became terrified listening to the news, sure the city would be the first one attacked. I begged my husband to move to the suburbs. Bostonians were building bomb shelters and storing a year’s worth of supplies in their basements. Television newscasts showed school children being drilled in how to drop, cover, and hide under their desks in case of an attack. Watching these programs kept my fear going. The war lasted until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and fifteen independent nations were born. Though there wasn’t a direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia, the Cold War cost the country billions of dollars. In 1945, when the Cold War started, the earth’s population was about 2.3 billion.
Another tense event occurred during The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. It scared my family and friends more than it did me. A male acquaintance recently described his panic and belief that the crisis would lead to the end of humankind. I was pregnant and living in England during the crisis, oblivious to the severity of the situation. It wasn’t until I saw news clips of President Kennedy informing the nation of developments in Cuba and his decision to enforce a “quarantine” that I understood the global consequences of the crisis continuing to escalate. In 1962, there were approximately 3.126 billion people around the globe.
The Civil Rights Movement didn’t hit me in full force until the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision was passed. Tensions escalated in the 60s while I was in Boston. You could feel it in the air. Bobby Seal and the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, with Malcolm X as its spokesman, made headline news. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Selma march to Montgomery in 1965 energized the movement with painful footage of county posses and state troopers charging 600 unarmed protesters. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began organizing students to participate in sit-ins and register black voters nationwide. The Ku Klux Klan and white Citizen’s Councils kept espousing racist views while saying they didn’t sanction violence. Though Black neighborhoods bore the brunt of destruction, the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Detroit Riot of 1967 shocked the nation, myself included.
Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination escalated the civil disobedience campaign with tent encampments. It was all we discussed at gatherings. Friends rode protest buses to the south and tried to get me to join in. My husband and I were chased by police with barking dogs at our heels when attending a rally at the tent city at the Boston Commons. We watched protesters next to us being grabbed by police and clubbed on the head before getting handcuffed and taken away. When I think back, I still feel the adrenaline rush accompanied by a knot in my stomach that made me want to throw up. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed in 1973, effectively ending the movement. Many states still haven’t adjusted to federally imposed desegregation and all citizens’ right to vote. In 1970, there were 3.695 billion spread across the earth.
Anxiety reached epic proportions in the 60s and 70s due to the Vietnam War, a conflict that lasted 20 years. The college towns I lived in were in constant turmoil with anti-war protests. The conflict started in 1954 when the communist government of North Vietnam was pitted against the South and its allies. With the United States bringing in active combat units, county draft boards were set up in 1964, calling up 2.2 million young men. Riots ensued, with people burning draft cards and growing long hair to protest military cuts. Many friends fled to Canada. I was worried about my brother being drafted. When he graduated college, he avoided the draft by teaching in a rural community, but his exemption didn’t last long. The lottery system was introduced, and my brother’s number was one of the first to be called. He developed an ulcer almost overnight that thankfully kept him from harm’s way. My husband and I watched the musical Hair, listened to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan songs, and joined protest marches.
At the time, I was a counselor in the emergency room of a community mental health center. Late one evening, a young man came in who had gone AWOL because he refused to kill North Vietnamese soldiers. He had become paranoid, believing everyone he passed on the street wanted to turn him. I hospitalized the youth and contacted a legal organization that helped soldiers avoid the draft. To get discharged from service, he had to return to the Marines. My patient was eventually released, but not before he was beaten and his arm broken. I was dismayed at hearing that. The war ended with 57,939 Americans and 250,000 Vietnamese declared dead. It cost our country a lot, and accomplished nothing. Today, we are friends and trading partners with communist Vietnam. By 1973, the globe contained 3.920 billion people.
Anger and fear permeated every waking hour throughout the 60s and 70s. Women joined those ready to fight for their rights. Though women had been seeking equity for decades, a wave of feminism was sparked by Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, creating a landslide of activity. Women were not only enraged, they burned their bras, protested against the Miss America Pageant, staged a Ladies’ Home Journal Sit-In, and organized The Women’s Strike for Equality. Feminists worked for social equality, with sexual reproductive rights as its center. Much of their energy went to passing the Equal Rights Amendment, which still hasn’t been ratified. However, they did influence the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, which protected people from discrimination based on sex. The movement’s crowning achievement was the pro-choice passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, a right taken away last year.
As an educated woman trained to be a stay-at-home mother and housewife, I was caught in the middle of the feminist moment. My eyes were opened when a fundraising event I organized for Impression 5 Science Museum fell apart. The Detroit Playboys Bunnies had agreed to a basketball match against community leaders, all of whom were male. The event created negative press and initiated protests by high school and college women. Though less press was given to the women’s movement by the 80s, it remained ongoing. The recent Supreme Court’s vote to eliminate abortion rights brought it to the forefront again. By 1980, there were 4.444 billion people on earth. When pro-choice was eliminated in 2022, the world population was 7,975 billion.
The Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and the Women’s Movement overlapped, causing tumultuous times like none other. Though upset and afraid during many of those years, I was also excited and energized by the thousands who joined forces to create a better world. It was a time of destruction yet an era of hope for those who believed change was possible. We felt confident that we were doing the right thing and that our voices would be heard.
Do I think things are worse today? After looking back, my answer is yes. Species are being eradicated at an alarming rate by something more worrisome than a bomb. It is hard to turn back the years of damage humans have inflicted on the planet. Global warming and pollution are hidden killers we have not effectively dealt with. Still, on the hopeful side, I believe a woman’s right to choose will be restored. I also think the NRA fights a losing battle. With crime and homicides increasing, the country will have to get control of firearms as it did in the West when cowboys new to town turned their guns over to the sheriff until they left town. I see the campaigns for universal healthcare, child and senior care, and those against domestic violence as having positive outcomes.
With the world’s population passing 8.045 billion this year, I hear little talk about the earth’s carrying capacity, especially with rising temperatures making vast swaths of land uninhabitable. This means more people will have to coexist on a shrinking amount of usable land. What is in store for the planet hasn’t hit enough people’s consciousness to change the course of the catastrophic events that will plague the globe for the coming decades. In the quest for profit, we’ve allowed carbon products and chemicals to pollute the land and water, raising temperatures from the Arctic to the Antarctic. We let corporations and individuals poison citizens with toxic throwaways and look the other way when they drown in floods or die from heat exposure.
The homeless encampments and illegal border crossings we experience now are minuscule compared to what we can expect in the future. Wars over water rights and rising sea levels that bury islands and flood vast swaths of coastal land will cause millions of people to move to a moderate climate. The push for electrified cars may help some, but won’t reduce the problem if we can’t produce non-polluting batteries and create enough electricity to prevent power outages.
Democracy is being challenged by billionaires who don’t care about the suffering of those subservient to them. Having a polarized and self-centered Congress makes everyone in the country feel worse. There is reason to be angry. Unfortunately, it shows up in unwholesome ways. I fear my children will have to survive ongoing natural disasters. I worry about how they will earn a living and occupy themselves when AI, mechanization, and Big Ag continue to take over jobs. I don’t believe I’m being paranoid. This is the new reality.
With the world’s population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, there is much to cause anxiety. Our citizens need a paradigm shift from self-centered thinking toward collective concerns for the earth and all plants and animals on it. This is why I wrote about ethics in last week’s blog. We have to find ways to get along with one another.
I look forward to your comments. Are you more afraid now than you were at other times during your life? So others can learn from you, Please share them below.
Art is always for sale. Flying High is a good way to remember the pandemic of 2020. Acrylic on canvas painting/framed/16″ x 20″ $596 includes shipping in the continental US. Contact me atmarilynne@eichingerfineart.com
Books: Over the Peanut Fence, about homeless and runaway youth, and Museum Junies about the rise of science centers are available in bookstores and on AMAZON.
References.
U.S. History website. The Cold War Erupts. Retrieved from https://www.ushistory.org/us/52a.asp#:~:text=The%20Cold%20War%20lasted%20about,the%20free%2Dmarket%20capitalist%20world.
Office of The Historian website. The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962 . Retrieved from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis#:~:text=
PBS American Experience website. Groups During the American Civil Rights Movement. retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eyesontheprize-groups-during-american-civil-rights-movement/
Lehman, C. (2006) Civil Rights in Twilight. Journal of Black Studies.
, pp. 415-428 Published By: Sage Publications, Inc. retrieved from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40035018
Vietnam War: Causes, Facts and Impact. History Channel. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history
Women’s History website. Second Wave Feminism: Collections. Retrieved from https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/womens-studies/collections/second-wave-feminism#:~:text=The%20second%20wave%20feminism%20movement,spread%20to%20other%20Western%20countries
ThoughtCo. Website. Significant Feminist Protests. retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/significant-american-feminist-protests-3529008
Worldometer website. World Population by Year. Retrieved from https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
