Sunflowers after a storm. July 2021. (Summerdog Farm, Boulder County, Colorado)
I remember the 1968 Soviet Union led invasion of Czechoslovakia. I watched the coverage of the invasion on a portable black and white television that sat on top of a brown oil stove in our cabin on the Neuse River in North Carolina. It was remote, and at that time we could barely pick up three TV stations, one from New Bern, one in little Washington, and on a good night, one in Greenville.
I write this during a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I find both comfort and despair in history.
The comfort is that we have done this before, and we have some models of behavior on how to get through it.
The despair is that we have done this before, and we don’t seem capable of not doing it again.
I spent much time in the 1960s fearful of nuclear war. At the age of 9, in 1964, I was terrified when Khrushchev was deposed, and I remember crying in my parent’s bedroom. I don’t remember any words of comforting wisdom about my 9-year-old concerns of unexpected changes in Soviet leadership.
My parents were politically aware and my father, still, politically active in the 1960s. He had been mayor of Cary, NC, for all of the 1950s and was, ultimately, labeled as progressive. In 1968, he was a Humphrey Democrat. He lent the Democrats a second-floor office on Chatham Street as a Headquarters. He was a patient and stable man, not prone to political rashness or brashness.
My father worked at WPTF radio station. He was an engineer in charge of the transmitter.
WPTF was an NBC affiliate and every hour had NBC News on the Hour. Whether at work or home, this show was mandatory. At our cabin on the Neuse River, we would catch sentences, phrases, or only words through screeching static.
WPTF was one of the “first line,” he called them, civil defense stations. The transmitter had been built with thick concrete walls and iron-screened windows. The engineers had been comically armed to fight off the Germans in World War II.
WPTF – “We Protect the Family.”
If something went bad, he would be among the first to know.
I kept a pulse on the state of the world. In the sixth grade I had my own subscription to U.S. News and World Report. Our family subscribed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, and its Doomsday Clock.
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Saturday that we were on “the brink of war.” No cartoons.
The movie “Invaders from Mars,” also on Saturday morning, terrified me even more.
I once had a writing teacher tell me that my awareness of politics and lack of awareness of alcoholism meant my stories had no credibility.
So it goes.
My father often worked at night; it was shift work. I would call and talk for hours. If I woke in the middle of the night, worried about the state of the world, I would see if WPTF was still transmitting its regular programming. I knew that would be pre-empted if the Russians were attacking. I would dial through the AM clear-channel radio stations checking on the state of the Nation. I did not listen to popular music; there was no news there.
Sometime around 1970, nuclear war subsided as my first line of fear.
If my father had existential fear, it never surfaced enough that I felt or saw it. My parents both worried about the country, and in particular, that racism and poverty threatened our fabric. But that did not convey as fear.
I felt an anchoring in my parents and their friends that I do not feel today. They did not express and foment anxiety. Those friends were both Democrats and Republicans. They all cared about our country and our world, though in vastly different ways. They were not compelled that the world had to conform to their personal visions.
Another worry of my father was fascism. He felt the behavior of our country in the 1980s portended fascism in the 2000s. He worried about war in Europe, seeing it as many in his generation, from a united Germany. He died in 1993, three years after the re-unification.
I find only small comfort in history to frame the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Putin seems to be acting as an individual, carrying out his archaic, aggrandizing version of Soviet history and the Russian empire.
Similarly, during the Trump presidency, the U.S. was steered towards his distorted and personal atavism.
John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev at least kept in mind that they were leading nations. There were global implications of their behavior.
The comfort I do find in history is that at some level we understand Putin; his vision is clear, and it aligns with a distinct thread through the centuries. When he fails, maybe it will be a historical moment.
But no one has dealt with a cornered bear with nuclear weapons.
I feel that we are closer to the use of a nuclear weapon in war than ever in my life.
I do not, however, feel the threat of world war and annihilation that I felt as a child.
I am grateful that we have a serious, grounded President, and that we have aligned NATO.
I imagine my parents were more fearful than I knew. The country and world in 1968 were plenty scary. There are always bad princes. For millennia they have fomented anxiety and driven conflict. It is a tactic.
There is always peril. We need to be aware, to manage, to make good individual decisions. We have to learn, to lead, and to manage our lives as the world is and persist in the pursuit of something better.
Afterward
As many are, I struggle with the invasion of Ukraine.
I am not a casual we have been here before, and we will get through this person. But I do find value and sometimes comfort in history.
There are many things that are same as they have always been, and we are durable in our tragedies. There is always opportunity for something to be different, but that requires persistent work, and we are less good at that.
This short essay is the way I cope, and my various vanities motivate me to post it. I am not looking for abuse, fight, or controversy. Discussion and discourse are welcomed.
As this is placed in Cary and makes mention of my father, some of my Cary friends might find it more personal.