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As many of you know, our own TomInTib was a close friend of Tom Snyder – who, sadly, has now passed. Their daily meetings were known in the neighbourhood as the "Tom & Tom Show", two old friends who enjoyed each others' conversation, companionship, and laughter.
I sent the following to TomInTib earlier in a PM and, at his request, I am posting it here:
I’ll always remember Tom Snyder as the guy who kinda sorta saved my life once – well, it sure felt like it at the time.
I was a kid in the ’50s, and grew up listening to my parents and the neighbours talking about the cold war, how the Ruskies were all out to get us – an entire country populated by communists who ‘hated us for our freedoms’ and were determined to ‘strike in the United States’.
They had no compunction about starting a nuclear war – as we were constantly reminded – because they were unhesitatingly willing to ‘die for their beliefs’. They didn’t love their children the way American parents loved theirs. They didn’t care about things like home and family, like Americans did.
They didn’t bother themselves with things like art, or books, or movies. They didn’t tend gardens, go for walks, or play croquet in the park. They didn’t plan family reunions or weddings; they didn’t have baby showers or birthday parties.
Every USSR citizen had but one thing on their mind, day in and day out: the destruction of the United States, its people, and everything it stood for – a goal to be achieved by any means available, even if the end result was that their own destruction was part of the bargain.
Or so we were told – and doesn’t it all have a familiar ring to it?
Like many of my generation, I grew up with this fear; a constant foreboding that someday, probably sooner rather than later, that much talked-about ‘mushroom cloud’ would suddenly appear over New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, and we’d all end up blown to smithereens or dead from the after-effects.
When Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show hit the airwaves, I became an instant fan. He was entertaining and informative; he knew how to interview with style, intelligence, and a sense of humor. His guests ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, and the topics discussed were intriguing and sometimes unpredicatble – but never anything less than interesting.
And now to the life-saving part of the story.
One night, Tom’s guest was a typical right-wing nut case – the type we’ve become all too familiar with nowadays – who railed on an on about the threat from those ‘terrorist’ Ruskies, and how the American citizenry better wake up and realize exactly how dire this threat was.
Tom listened intently, the whole time just barely keeping a smile off his face. When the guest finally stopped his little diatribe, Tom said, “Well, I gotta tell ya. I just can’t bring myself to be afraid of people who have to wait ten years to get a telephone in their apartment.”
And that was the life-saving moment. I realized that if a man like Tom Snyder – intelligent, well-educated, and well-informed – could dismiss the fear-mongering as so much rhetoric spouted by people with a political agenda, so could I.
That was the day I stopped being afraid. Tom’s simple statement humanized the person I’d been taught to fear. He wasn’t a guy who was bent on the annihilation of my country; he was a guy who wanted a telephone – and probably a new pair of ice-skates for his kid, and a winning hand at the Friday night card game, and maybe an hour of peace and quiet to catch up on his reading.
I don’t think a week has gone by over the past few years that I haven’t thought about that awakening – and wondered whether there is a Tom Snyder out there for this generation of kids who are growing up in fear, and are being taught to see individuals on the other side of the world as people whose sole thought, whose only goal in life, is to destroy them, instead of seeing them as people just like us, people who want telephones, and DVDs, and the latest PlayStation game - and a peaceful world.
I hope there is.
Condolences to those who of us who have lost a man we grew up loving for his wit and style - and to TomInTib, who has lost a dear friend.
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