August 19, 1991 – General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev faced a military coup and was placed under house arrest, in my opinion signifying the moment the Soviet collapse became inevitable. I sort of held my breath for a couple of days there.
I was living in a flat on the corner of Army (Now Caesar Chavez) and Church Streets in San Francisco. We had a patio on the roof and the fog came in pretty quickly as I was listening to the events as described on KPFA. I looked down at the traffic, and everybody just going about their lives as normal. I’ve already posted about the my childhood nuclear war fears – induced by various readings and watching the film On The Beach while home from school sick. I was not alive at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody, not even the alternative media, was discussing the events of summer, 1991 as a possible chain reaction which could lead to the end of all life on Earth. I tried not to focus on it that way, but the three days of that coup had me on edge. I was relieved when the “Gang of Eight” was defeated several days later, and for once in my life I didn’t care the least about the political implications.
I never had any of the dreams again, and I’ve never since – maybe due to a false sense of security – had the feeling that complete annihilation of the human race is a likely possibility, at least not through hot war. Someone might do something stupid, and maybe the last victims of a nuclear bomb are yet to be born. But as of 20 years ago, I don’t have that sense of foreboding which led me to be arrested in civil disobedience on different occasions.
It was always speculative to me. These people actually lived the nightmare.
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August 19, 2011 at 7:53 am
Anonymous
I read your past post once more. I had almost forgot that your parents ended the Viet Nam war almost single handedly and sent you to UC Santa Cruz to be a good little America hating leftie. And then you moved up to Humboldt County to ply your trade as a lawyer in the most notorious pot growing region in America.
Such a success story! Kind of makes me feel all warm inside.
but here’s a thought for you childhood memories! What if? Just what if a nuke gets detonated in a U.S. city? What if our government (the one you don’t seem to care for much) has an idea who was behind the terrorist attack? Which country supplied the materials, helped to assemble or transport the nuke? What do you think
the U.S. will do?
August 19, 2011 at 8:00 am
Eric Kirk
That’s quite a narrative there, with big assumptions based on quite the caricature of me. Hats off.
What do you think the US will do?
August 19, 2011 at 8:20 am
Joe Blow
And none of it was necessary either. Reading this: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima should make your day – actually everyone’s day.
“Foreboding”? You’ve got real reason when you understand that and how the immutable Universal Law applies here. Based upon a lifetime’s personal experience, I’d say that day is at hand – those forces are already at work.
August 19, 2011 at 9:14 am
Cristina Bauss
My sharpest memory of the end of the Cold War isn’t of the official end itself, but of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The night it happened, I was 20 years old, working as a cashier at Caesars Tahoe. When I went downstairs for dinner, the atmosphere in the break room – which was usually like a high-school cafeteria, with dealers at one table, food servers at another, maintenance staff at another, and so on – was decidedly different. The place was packed, and everyone was clustered together around the TV’s, watching intently. I squeezed in between a bunch of people to get to one of the screens, and asked what was going on. A couple of people excitedly told me, “they’re tearing the Berlin Wall down.” For the older people, who remembered it being built, there was jubilation. For those of us who had never known anything else – who had grown up with the specter of the Cold War, and the deep, uneasy awareness of the “unknown” behind the Iron Curtain – it was simply surreal.
No one wanted to leave the cafeteria that night; we were all transfixed by the footage, by the energy exhibited by the people literally taking the wall apart. As clichéd as it sounds, it was a truly unifying moment.
August 19, 2011 at 10:34 am
Bolithio
The cold war existed in comic books and punk rock songs for me. My parents where never political, so I didnt get the 10 min to midnight scare from them. This video did have an impression on me as a youth in the MTV era, although I didnt truly understand what was going on until I was older. Reading the links you posted above about the Hiroshima a-bomb is just mind blowing.
August 19, 2011 at 11:54 am
Not A Native
OK, WE WON THE WAR. SO WHERE IS OUR PEACE DIVIDEND?
August 19, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Dave Kirby
I was in the Air Force when the Cuban missile crisis went down. Don’t think many know how close that was to a shooting war. Strategic Air Command bases were put on a war footing. We had machine gun positions all around the runway and at vital infrastructure sites. The bombers were nuked up. The flight crews were told there were no more drills …the next time the horn went off it was a go. Don’t know how much of it was profiling for the Russian’s benefit. It felt pretty intense.