Yearning for days of my youth.

The events taking place these days makes me yearn for the days of yesterday, the days of family happiness, Dad watering the front lawn, Mom sorting out the spat that created yet another dispute among brothers and sisters and the best part of this fantasy, the bomb shelter twenty-two feet under our back yard. Safety in planning, the Civil Defense would advertise in the posters, direct mail, and plan everyone did.

Thinking back to days of my childhood, the very image of the fall of the Berlin Wall was unknown, let alone the fall of communism and the Russian way of life. Images and thoughts of the fall of communism were not even remotely on the horizon, let alone nasty old Fidel Castro the sole remaining communist. My Father always used to say that it would take a magician to stop communism, who would have thought it would take a man named, Ronald Reagan and a Pope named, John Paul, not a magician to make it happen.

These were the days of air raid drills taking place during school, where the entire school would go to the basement’s west corner wall, knell down, bend our heads and cover them with our hands. As children performing that self-preservation ritual we felt so secure in the knowledge that if the big one hit, we would survive to carry on the American dream. Of course, only the faculty was aware of the true knowledge behind this exercise in futility, get the small bodies off the street so it would not gross everyone out, but we felt safe.

Today we are faced with events that are quickly forming a life of its own, moving beyond the control of humans. Headlines such as: Day of Hope and Bloodshed, Iraq gets new government as bombs kill 24, Israeli aid strike kills four Palestinians in Gaza, scream at us from online news services, Yahoo, Topix, Google, and feeling safe is something of a mystery.

There was that time when I was in grade school that the class discussed the previous day’s events where Nikita Khrushchev stood at the UN podium, pounding his brown shoe repeatedly on the top of it while screaming, “Мы вас похороним!”, which translated meant, “We will bury you”. Many events changed the course of history back then, things such as The Bay of Pigs fiasco, and The Assassination of President Kennedy.

I suppose things truly never do change, the world keeps spinning, countries continue to hate one another and war never really stops, it is a road show, it simply travels to another location leaving its death and destruction in its wake. Perhaps it is time we tried to change things, but then again, that would mean the people of the world would have to get along and the one thing we have learned over the course of history is that will never happen.