The sky is always falling
Putin pulled the plug on his ambitions to relive his KGB glory days, emulate Peter the Great, and reconstitue the USSR by invading Ukraine. Hasn’t he been telling us his intentions all along? Who could have foreseen this? Certainly not a random little old lady in FL at least15 years ago. Yesterday The Telegraph reported that, “experts say that war between Russia and Ukraine will change everyday life in the UK in ways most people have not yet fully understood. From mortgage-rate rises to bigger grocery bills, and cyber attacks to a new age of nuclear anxiety.” Today one article is entitled “Back to the future: the return of existential dread” Experts, They must be deferred to in all areas of life at all costs for our own good. How is that making the world safe for democracy going these days?
We old folks must be forgiven if we are a tad sanguine when it comes to scares of inflation, housing market volatility or “nuclear anxiety”. Once one has cowered under a desk, worried about finding gas on a cross-country move with a baby and a dog in a Vega, and been under water for more than 10 years on a house purchased in 2008 it is hard for experts to scare me too much.
My life spanned most of the last Cold War. During the Cuban Missile Crisis I stayed overnight at a school in central Florida with one wall of glass for the sake of safety. We had weekly duck and cover drills and Disney reminded us how to do this properly. When I was 10 we moved back to KY and we drove out to Boonesborough to reconnoiter the county bomb shelter at the quarry there, near the coal fired electicity generating plant my father nicknamed Moscow because at night it lit up like a Christmas tree in that remote darkness.
Later, as a adult, our family had just arrived in Okinawa when the USSR shot a Korean airliner out of the sky. We knew our flight, too, had likely strayed a bit too far to the west to surveil the soviets. Again in Japan in 1988 the fact that our home telephone was tapped to surveil enemy attempts to bribe or blackmail a military contacting officer came in handy to warn an unhappy treatment client of mine from further harassment. At the office every phone conversation began with “this is an unsecure line” and my kids knew more about OpSec from AFRTS/FEN than the any civics they got from School House Rocks.
In the 70s we feared child abductions, nuclear power plant meltdowns, over-the-counter drug poisonings, toxic waste and even being hit by SkyLab debris. In what one Telegraph writer called the “apocalyptic 1980s” we were primed to fear Libyans, highjacking and strangers. The existential threat of the late 90s was Y2K. Then we partied like it was 1999 until 9/11. Another Telegraph headline today called the invasion Europe’s 9/11. Having been through that one, too, I watched in real time as a person jumped from a doomed building and the second tower fell, knowing someone close was working in the Pentagon and that the side struck was just arond the corner from my old office with a window.
Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornados, wildfires, typhoons, lightening strikes, cancer - most have not affected me directly, but I’ve been there. It takes a lot to scare me now. I have gone out of my way to visit Hiroshima and he Holocaust museum in DC which are frightening reminders. I have also known the fall of the Berlin wall, the natural renewal of Kauai after Hurricane Iniki, receding flood waters and the repair of the Pentagon.
The secretary general of NATO since 2014, Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg , says Putin’s invasion is “the most dangerous moment in European security for a generation.” According to our reliabe hawks at National Review, “The invasion of Ukraine will push up the price of energy at a time when U.S. consumer and producer prices are already growing” making the Fed’s job even more difficult and “the prices of other commodities — certain metals, wheat — will increase as well, which could further exacerbate consumer and producer prices. Global trade will be disrupted. . . Financial-market volatility will increase.” See - “stocks are plunging”. Just like the sky.
You see, I remember the Berlin airlift, the 1964 Johnson “Daisy” ad, and the fall of East Germany. I have even been up to that former border. I saw Dr. Strangelove and survived. I am not anything special. Resilience was just something everyone could learn best in the school of hard knocks that is life. I am grateful that my knocks have been few and far between. A few years ago I taught “resilience” classes at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium. I can only imagine how woke that curriculum has gotten since then. If one believes, as I do, that something (God/gods, karma, or little purple aliens) determines our fate it follows that adversity is either (1) the result of one’s past sins or of (2) one’s capacity to endure (I was a Job’s Daughter). Of course, both postulates have problems. How does #1 explain the bad things that happen to good people? How does #2 explain people who cannot cope? I suspect life experience is still the best teacher, but regret that another war, be it hot or cold, seems to be shaping up to provide that experience.