The Personal and the Political: Part III

 

My junior level history students recently watched Duck and Cover, a nine minute instructional film made by the Civil Defense Administration and the National Education Association in 1951. The purpose of the film is to teach students how to best protect themselves in the event of a nuclear attack. 

One scene depicts a boy, maybe nine years old, in a white button down shirt and tie throwing himself under his school desk and covering the back of their head with folded hands. Another scene shows a girl in jacket and head scarf in the street asking an older gentleman for directions to the nearest bomb shelter as air raid sirens begin. Other scenes include an older boy leaping off his bike to shield himself against a curb, students playing stick ball at recess hearing the sirens and a gathering of young neighbors dispersing to their own homes under the air raid sirens.

My colleagues and I play the film to teach our students about the Cold War, specifically the impact of foreign threats on domestic worldview. Sometimes a student laughs at the absurdity of the man that covers himself with a newspaper. Sometimes a student connects the threat to modern terrorist organizations. For me, watching the film brings memories of elementary school, watching the same film, and accepting the inevitability of a nuclear, or at least military, conflict with the Soviet Union. I knew about Red Dawn and Mad Max. I knew what was at stake. 

I can't speak to the prevalence of the reaction, but I remember anticipating an impending conflict between the evil Soviet empire and our virtuous, peace loving, warrior nation. I remember the confidence I had in my nation's leadership to not only be honorable and moral but victorious. I was confident in my neighbors, my teachers, my police and, of course, my nation's military. When I would go outside to play, I would anticipate a bit part in the conflict, maybe uncovering a local commie agent in rural Minnesota, maybe leading a resistance against a wall of Soviet infantry and tanks. And I knew the commie tricks, so I could stop them. Those sneaky bastards always used tricks. I had seen Rocky IV. 

When I look back now, I'm shocked by how much of my childhood play involved killing communist enemies. Sometimes the enemies weren't communists. Sometimes they were storm troopers, terrorist groups like Cobra, or Skeletor's minions. And sometimes they were a giant radioactive monster that lived in the ocean and snuck up on land to terrorize good, peace loving people. But what held them all togetherwas the Soviet archetype I understood, the menace of the East, the unchanging "other". The commies were imminent in some form or another. And as General Jack D. Ripper said in Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, "I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids."  

Like General Ripper, I internalized the threat. I grew suspicious of things I didn't know or understand.  The unfamiliar was threatening. I saw strangers and strangeness as potential threats until I was assured of safeness. And while there is some wisdom in caution, especially as a child meeting a stranger, there is also spiritual and material damage in automatically seeing the "other" as a threat. And I didn't notice the limitations this siege mentality created as a child. It was "just the way it is." In other words, the more I saw threats everywhere, the more my internal energies were sapped and impurified.

As I've reflected on watching Duck and Cover with my class, I've been struck by a familiar observation that raises an unfamiliar question. What does it mean that the the older high school students, are teaching the younger students how to react to the nuclear threat?  I think there is something behind this depiction besides the appeal to pedagogical ethos. 

I realized the older children in the film had accepted that their future likely included a nuclear conflict. From this premise the only prudent thing to do was to prepare yourself and others. Oh, the narrator enthusiastically states, "we hope it never comes," but that's a meaningless statement, so I discount it. The older students were teaching the younger students not just nominal survival techniques, they were teaching the younger students to also accept the nuclear fire as inevitable, to content themselves with an unimaginative and unimaginable future. 

They should have been dismantling that future. 

They should have been flipping their teachers the bird. They should have been throwing books and screaming at the narrator, "You can't be f@cking serious! You want me to cower on a curb when they drop a f@cking hydrogen bomb on my school?" They should have taken those younger children away from the adults teaching them to acquiesce to a self-fulfilling future of unavoidable nuclear holocaust and all the offered fear that underlies that future.

It hit me: in this film school wasn't teaching the kids to prepare for life, it was teaching them to prepare for death. Not just the death of their bodies, but their hearts, their minds, and their spirits. The underlying violence of the film isn't found in the atomic bomb, its found in teaching us to accept the atomic bomb.

But I'm conflicted. Just as I realize the wisdom of teaching young people to be skeptical of unknown adults, I realize there is some wisdom in preparing students for death and violence as well. I mean, death is one inevitability we all share. And yet, shouldn't we be teaching our youth about life and how to live? Shouldn't we teach them how to create a world that protects us from the bomb by getting rid of the bomb? How to grow communities that aren't under attack? How to nurture a personal and communal future free from threat and conflict?

If this were an argument, I'd anticipate a rebuttal that I'm naïve. That the nature of humans is conflict, competition, striving, surviving. I guess I'd agree. Then I'd suggest we work on creating something unnatural, like we've done with eye glasses, prosthetics, books, antibiotics, the Taj Mahal, The Magic Flute and the International Space Station. 

Maybe I'm blaming that strange mix of memory and re-collection for current frustrations. Memory is a strange thing. It's hard to tease out what really happened from what you remember and what you project back. 

But I'm stuck now with some practical questions about growing up and reflecting on growing up: How have I embraced or echoed narratives of fear? What narratives of fear do I see in my community? How have I embraced narratives of power? courage? resilience? What unintended lessons come with the historical narratives in my community? How do I model freedom from oppression and freedom from threat in a material and spiritual reality? How do I help my students recognize the layers of complexity of the simplified narratives that have shaped them? How do I help write constructive, peaceful narratives for a future populated with my children and (maybe?) grandchildren?