The end of the world

Iwas recently watching a documentary about the Cold War and Joe McCarthy’s search for spies in the country; they showed old clips of people pounding their fists on podiums and grainy photos of suspected spies while they talked about the fear at the time that the world could come to a terrible end at any minute.

I was thinking about how terrible that must have been when I looked up at some old family photos that would have been taken around the same time. While the TV was showing protesters with signs marching in New York I thought about my Nana and Papa on their farms in Tennessee and granmother and grandaddy at their homes in Tuscumbia and wondered how aware of the world’s descent into madness they were.

It reminded me of this time five years ago when it seemed like something similar was happening in our world; on the news and social media it looked like the world was burning down all around us and each day brought some new terrifying report.

It would have been easy to get wrapped up in the hysteria and be glued to the news every second of the day, and my working with the public made it impossible to completely ignore, but most of the time at the height of all of that craziness we chose to sit on the porch.

We read books while our kids played in the yard; we waved as cars drove by and FaceTimed family that it was unsafe to go and see. We tried new recipes and watched old movies in the evenings.

I wasn’t there with my grandparents in the 1940s, but I imagine they did much of the same. Minus the FaceTime and Disney+, of course.

We didn’t ignore the problems out there, but we put it in its proper perspective. We prepared for what might come but lived our life as normally as possible. And I wouldn’t want to go through that time again, but five years on I look back fondly at the time we spent hunkered down in the bomb shelter that was our little family.