Every Friday at noon, all over the city, the air raid sirens went off from many locations. At the school they showed us films of the bombing of Japan with all the death from radiation poisoning and told us how we'd meet the same fate when the Russian missiles based in Cuba came.
We had to get under our desk in the 'kiss your ass goodbye' pose when the sirens went off. Each of us were issued dogtags on necklaces with our name, age and religion on stamped into the stainless steel. We were told they'd be jammed between our teeth or toes to identify the corpses. Nice imagery, that.
They divided up the class from those who would be allowed to run home to die with our families and the rest of us they told we'd have to die at school. That had a big effect on me, as I was in the latter group. On any random day, I would leave for school and never see them again.
At times planes buzzed the school to make it more realistic. For our own good... About that time I decided the adults running the world were just fucking nuts.
To function, I realized the official belief were just parallel to my hopes for the future. You know, like those New Year's Resolutions. Others just retreated from reality, which I believe is what many are still doing right now.
No wonder we became hippies as we didn't think that we'd very live long and wanted to make the best of our time on Earth. Very much strawberry and the tiger thinking for some of us. I was never able to lose myself in dogma and escape the way that I see many do.
But overall, I think these kind of drills are much worse. What we were threatened with was impersonal, from people we didn't expect to interact with and couldn't see any more than we could the wind of a tornado, just live with the effects.
These drills should be for training first responders, not the victims. Between that and the bullshit in media, games and movies, kids are living a nightmare. I guess it was always going to be like this in some form or another. Just look at what is still going on in the world. There is no security for many people, there never was.
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