****************OFF TOPIC: SELECTIVE MEMORY & THE 50's***************
....the heyday of segregation...
At first, I nodded approvingly. And then I thought, no, we're not being fair here. It was in the 50's, after all, that segregation was seriously challenged for the first time: Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), Desegregation in Little Rock (1957)....It took the 60's to finish off the job, but the work began in the 50's.
the stupid 'duck-and-cover' drills
And those drills continued into the early sixties...I can remember working in Manhattan then. When the air-raid signals would begin wailing, we did not duck & cover under our desks (we were grown-ups, after all!); instead, we went down to the second-floor landing. My co-workers who had been through the bombings of World War II would laugh their heads off: some protection, huddling on the second floor!
And those goofy maps showing how Manhattan would be evacuated in the event of a nuclear attack, published in the local press in the early 60's? (Again, what a laugh: these are New Yorkers, man! They are going to be pushing each other off the George Washington Bridge!)
The biggest joke of all was President Kennedy (he of the mythic missile gap), urging all Americans to go out and build their own bomb shelters! Sure, Jack, here I am in my fifth-floor apartment on Riverside Drive, and I am going out with my shovel right this minute to dig me a bomb shelter smack in the middle of 110th Street...
Ah, memories...
jbe |
