watched the news every night. It was the only TV I got to watch, and so I was there in the front row. When I was about Rosena’s age, I watched, transfixed, as the Iran hostage crisis unfolded, as the Mount St. Helens volcano exploded in Washington State, as the Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands starved to death in British custody, as four U.S. church women—Jean Donovan and Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel—were raped and murdered in El Salvador, and as President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II were both shot and injured. The whole time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ’ Doomsday Clock stood at seven minutes to nuclear midnight (it is at five minutes today, by the way).
This is what we talked about around the dinner table. And it was terrifying. I had nightmares. I worried. I recently found a “poem” I wrote when I was nine:
What will happen when the bomb comes shoting [sic] down? I am not in a hurry to know. I don’t want to see it come tumbling down. The president will say: I declare war on Russia, or India, or Norway, or any other country. But it’s not their fault. We could have prevented it from happening. I hope we can someday .
It is written in my best handwriting and illustrated with little bombs.
When I was Rosena’s age, I knew a lot about nuclear weapons. We watched grainy black-and-white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the wall of our living room. I could fold paper cranes and tell you the story of Sadako, the little girl in Hiroshima who died of leukemia even though she was not even born when the United States dropped the two nuclear bombs on her country in August 1945. She tried to fold a thousand paper cranes so that the gods would make her better. She did not finish her task, but her friends and family kept folding origami cranes after she died, erecting a statue of her in Hiroshima.
My sister Kate also remembers growing up with an active fear of nuclear weapons. When she heard planes flying low overhead, she expected that the bombing would start any moment. Despite this fear she doesn’t think that we should have been more sheltered as children. “The gift from that exposure,” she says, “is a more or less constant awareness of my level of comfort in daily life and of those who aren’t so lucky. The challenge of that is to then strike a balance between guilt and action. Do you get self-serving about it or do you find tools and resources to address the problems that you see?”
It made sense that we knew all this. It helped us understand our immediate reality—going to lots of protests, watching the people we loved getting arrested and hauled off to jail, collecting food from dumpsters and sharing it with hundreds of our neighbors on a weekly basis.
Rosena is not writing poetry yet, but she is churning out art at a prodigious rate. I marvel at her cheerful drawings—blocks of color, grand sweeps of magic marker and crayon, intricate illustrations of her big loving family. Each drawing comes with a long and elaborate backstory that she relishes telling. There are no nuclear bombs or heavily armed men lurking in the background. Nuclear aggression and mutually assured destruction are not part of her pictures. There is not even a hint of deprivation or longing—except for deceased and beloved cats, and the dog and horse she hopes to someday have.
Within an hour of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, we got an email from her school with suggestions for how to talk about the tragedy. They said that we should stick to simple and brief reassurances that she is safe and that school is safe. Over the weekend, we got another email updating parents and caregivers on new school security procedures, telling us how they planned to handle discussions with the kids on Monday. “In K/1 we will not make any reference in the classrooms to the incident. As we normally do, children will write about their weekend. If any students mention the
This is what we talked about around the dinner table. And it was terrifying. I had nightmares. I worried. I recently found a “poem” I wrote when I was nine:
What will happen when the bomb comes shoting [sic] down? I am not in a hurry to know. I don’t want to see it come tumbling down. The president will say: I declare war on Russia, or India, or Norway, or any other country. But it’s not their fault. We could have prevented it from happening. I hope we can someday .
It is written in my best handwriting and illustrated with little bombs.
When I was Rosena’s age, I knew a lot about nuclear weapons. We watched grainy black-and-white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the wall of our living room. I could fold paper cranes and tell you the story of Sadako, the little girl in Hiroshima who died of leukemia even though she was not even born when the United States dropped the two nuclear bombs on her country in August 1945. She tried to fold a thousand paper cranes so that the gods would make her better. She did not finish her task, but her friends and family kept folding origami cranes after she died, erecting a statue of her in Hiroshima.
My sister Kate also remembers growing up with an active fear of nuclear weapons. When she heard planes flying low overhead, she expected that the bombing would start any moment. Despite this fear she doesn’t think that we should have been more sheltered as children. “The gift from that exposure,” she says, “is a more or less constant awareness of my level of comfort in daily life and of those who aren’t so lucky. The challenge of that is to then strike a balance between guilt and action. Do you get self-serving about it or do you find tools and resources to address the problems that you see?”
It made sense that we knew all this. It helped us understand our immediate reality—going to lots of protests, watching the people we loved getting arrested and hauled off to jail, collecting food from dumpsters and sharing it with hundreds of our neighbors on a weekly basis.
Rosena is not writing poetry yet, but she is churning out art at a prodigious rate. I marvel at her cheerful drawings—blocks of color, grand sweeps of magic marker and crayon, intricate illustrations of her big loving family. Each drawing comes with a long and elaborate backstory that she relishes telling. There are no nuclear bombs or heavily armed men lurking in the background. Nuclear aggression and mutually assured destruction are not part of her pictures. There is not even a hint of deprivation or longing—except for deceased and beloved cats, and the dog and horse she hopes to someday have.
Within an hour of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, we got an email from her school with suggestions for how to talk about the tragedy. They said that we should stick to simple and brief reassurances that she is safe and that school is safe. Over the weekend, we got another email updating parents and caregivers on new school security procedures, telling us how they planned to handle discussions with the kids on Monday. “In K/1 we will not make any reference in the classrooms to the incident. As we normally do, children will write about their weekend. If any students mention the
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