Nuclear Bomb Explodes (It's Only LA!)

            As a mushroom cloud created by a nuclear detonation unfurled on television tonight over Los Angeles, I remembered 1983 – the last time I watched a nuclear bomb going off in America in prime time.  As a 14-year-old, I was profoundly affected by the ABC miniseries “The Day After” when a television show demanded that we consider the most dire implications of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

            How times have changed.  I know many people who are too young to remember the latter stages of the Cold War… moments, people and places I feel like I grew up with: May Day weapons parades in Red Square, Olympic boycotts, Charter 77, Ceaucescu, Gorbachev, Walesa, Havel, Chernobyl, Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative – the “Miracle on Ice”.  Time and history march on.

         And yet today I heard first hand from one person who marched in Selma, Alabama, while others quoted Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King – both of whom were assassinated the year I was born – as contemporaries.  I feel young.  I wasn’t alive to feel and remember the fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the discontent of the civil rights movement, the sting of Watergate or the quagmire of Vietnam.  I can only compare my feelings to today’s generation with 9/11 and Iraq– but it doesn’t seem the same to me. The fate of the world has never seemed so dire as that gloom of nuclear winter hanging over this country in my teens.

         I guess all I want to say is that I was a little shocked when Kiefer Sutherland didn’t stop this nuclear warhead from exploding tonight.  Kudos to my favorite television show EVER, 24, for jarring us out of a 2007 complacency – on MLK Day of all days.  The Cold War may have long since diminished, but I think the likelihood of apocalyptic devastation due to man-made stupidity has not.