What If?

“There are experiences we have as children, each and every one of us, that find a place deep inside us where neither time nor wounds can reach or damage them. And those experiences? They light our way through the world for the rest of our lives. Many of us forget them as we grow older, yet still they remain, shaping who we are at a level too deep for words. They shape, yet they also wait. They wait to be remembered, wait for the time when we need to remember them, when we need a particular kind of light to find our way in darkness. Some of those experiences are memories of moments when, for some reason, never to be completely understood with our rational mind, the day-to-day world changes.” - Stephen Harrod Buhner in Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, page 1.

I have often looked back at one particular incident from my childhood that was monumentally impactful and starkly pivotal in molding the neurology I would build my world around thenceforth. It was October of 1962. I was barely ten years old, walking to school each day to attend the fourth grade. I should have been lost in the dreams of my formative years, but instead was swept up consciously and emotionally in the mean affairs of the world.

 We didn't watch much television in those days – westerns where cowboys clearly wore white or black hats, Leave It to Beaver, Disney, and Ed Sullivan. In most stories there was an obvious lesson or behavioral moral to help steer young minds along the “right” path. Most of the time I lived for putting on my baseball glove and heading to the ball field to play with my pals, as it should have been. But the world was caught up in a Cold War which permeated my whole world as very real and pervasive.

Khrushchev said he would bury us. I had viewed his fiery speech far too often on our black and white console television. The threat was real. Practicing drills at school where we would crawl under our desks in the event of a nuclear blast only further impressed upon our young minds that the world was not a safe or “for sure” place.

During the critical days of the Cuban Missile Crisis that October, it was the only topic of conversation between people, including children. I recall very clearly stopping to talk to my classmate's mother about the events of the day while walking home from school. On the day that President John Kennedy called Khrushchev's bluff we were told when we were dismissed from school that there may be no school the following day because the world we knew may be no more. Nuclear war between the two super powers would become a reality if Khrushchev did not back down. I was ten years old. How do you process that?

“In those deeply charged moments, the very quality of reality shifts and the alteration is so striking, the feeling impact so strong, the effect on psyche so deep, that it is not possible for the depths of us to truly forget.” - Buhner, p. 1.

How did the Cuban Missile Crisis ultimately shape my orientation toward the world? And then the subsequent assassination of our dearly loved President Kennedy? I can only speculate. But it does seem as if I was robbed of something important. Looking back, it seems as if “they” stole my future from me, and all of us. The bright future that was promised to us was ripped away, just like that. Paradise was Lost when Camelot fell.

One can only wonder what the world would have been like over the past half century and today had the deviant powers that be that make wars and suppress people had not redirected the momentum of history in my formative years. I like to believe we are finally striking back in these days and beginning to restore the world to a better way for all people.