As an early "boomer", I have not been this frightened

[electric_blue68]

50. Cuban Missile Crisis then 9-11

I'm at the beginning of the 2nd third of Boomer bloom.

So I think I was in 5th grade gifted class in NYC. I was smart and precocious in certain ways. While I didn't get everything about the CMC I already had a good idea about how bad nuclear weapons were!
( In '63 we here in NYC didn't do the Duck & Cover. But we were civilian target #2 after DC had ? monthly air raid drills with those searing sirens, and we had a siren right on top of our school! And of course, they were going off all over our city. Terrifying. )
So we got the NYT in class which had the headlines and photos of the naval blockade ships heading to Cuba.
I knew there was going to be major obliteration; though not as badly posited as when we learned about Nuclear Winter ? 20 years later.

I remember someone a public radio journalist said at a panel I was at that was around the timec that "The Day After" town/neighborhood halls meeting were- that she felt we split off into a parallel Earth where JFK & Khruschev made the right decisions and we survived, but from where we split off; the other "us"went to nuclear hell. And for those of you who know the Many World's Theory that some Theorhectical Physicists subscribe to this follows their idea.

And 9-11 for me having worked on the NE corner office of the 73rd flr of South Tower (2) 20 years earlier for a year I knew thhat area well, and then in 2001 I was barely a mile away north of that general area much of the time - although thank goodness I woke up late - it had happened already (didn't even know it had at first) so I never made it into Manhattan as I lived not far north of downtown Brooklyn.

My god it was terrifying because besides the immediate carnage we just didn't know - was anything else going to happen? Just writing these last few sentences stirs up an echo of that fear. That's ok - it gives me a baseline look at temporarily heightened emotion stirred up briefly at this moment.

So yeah, and I know they're going to try something(s) again. I won't totally obsess, I have other things both extra chores needing doing, and thank goodness fun and creative at home stuff I can do.

Now I that I've spell checked, grammared, and tweaked this I'm feeling ok again (as I can be under these circumstances). 👍