THE TIME I ALMOST KISSED YOUNG MILDRED GOOD-BYE

Ramping up to the Cuban Missile Crisis and as things started heating up with Russia way back in the late1950's and early1960's (The Pre-Stoned Age) students used to have air raid drills and were instructed on what to do if attacked by enemy missiles.  Was the term "friendly fire" even used then? What would have happened if one of out own missile silos had blown up or misfired or something?  Were we ever instructed on that?  Just a thought!  Oh, Uncle Sam doesn't make those kind of boo-boo's we all know that! Just ask any Republican. Weren't the big right-wingers back then the John Birch Society?

I lived in a city that had an air force base and can attest to the fact that when the Missile Crisis and nuclear war was a real threat we had frequent drills. Thank you for scaring the bejesus out of me, Nikita Khrushchev! Perhaps Vladimir Putin could learn a thing or two from you. [That's being written with Maine sarcasm if you aren't one who is fluent in Mildred...] 

The one thing they didn't tell us or give us any instructions about was what to do if a nuclear warhead hit and we were ground zero or anywhere close to ground zero. They weren't honest! No one told us that we could kiss our sweet young asses good-bye, but even as a small child I could see the real worry, the real concern in the adults eyes.  That's when I knew something was amiss.  That's when I knew something wasn't right in the world and it needed to be fixed pronto! 

Of course, they weren't going to frighten children like that and cause an outbreak of panic and and hysteria. I may have been just a kid, but I caught enough on the evening news to know what was going on and knew David Brinkley, Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite were not some blowhards like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly.  Can you even imagine that?  My mother would have popped a vein in her head if Walter Cronkite came off sounding like Rush Limbaugh.  OMG!  Or David Brinkley sounded like Tucker Carlson? Holy Christ! Say it isn't so! My father would dropped kicked the television set across the dooryard. And those were the days when people only had one television set per household.  It wasn't like how it is now with our pampered asses of today! Oh by the way, for those of you who weren't born and raised in Maine, a "dooryard" is your yard where you go to play as a child. 

That was back in the days when the news was just the news before it became fake and filled with guff from conspiracy theorists. We knew the threat was real because they told us it was real.  Why did we know that? Because they didn't lie! They told it like it was and only like it was. When exactly did that stop? 

The newspaper article is dated October 20, 1959.