Changes

Last week I turned 72. I’m no longer a spring chicken, but still well within the life expectancy of most American men. I’ve seen some huge, startling changes in my lifetime.

I was born just as the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era was getting going. I remember atomic bomb drills in elementary school every month, for eight years. Russia was the enemy. As a teenager, I watched the Cuban missile crisis unfold on the nightly news. After college, I was drafted into the Army, where I was trained to shoot down Russian strategic bombers, using state-of-the-art anti-aircraft missiles. For the first half-century of my life, Russia was THE ENEMY, a constant danger ready to destroy the United States at any moment. Anyone who dared to be “soft” on Russia was a traitor, pure and simple. The best teacher I ever had was fired, simply for daring to teach the Russian language to four interested students. Those who did not live through the “Cold War” can have no idea how Russia-phobia was.

We survived the Cold War, the Soviet Union dissolved, and world Communism collapsed, mostly. The terror and threat of instant annihilation abated, and Russian-American relations became, if not exactly friendly, at least normalized.

Without the constant competition with Russia, it became possible for Americans to start working on our own very real problems: racism, sexism, poverty. America is a very different place than it was when I was first becomming aware of the way things were. During my first three decades, divorce was the kiss of death for any would-be politician. Female legislators were unheard of. Same for female judges. The idea that the US would someday have a black president, or a woman on the Supreme Court bench was not even a joke. The American Red Cross used separate thermometers for Black and White patients, even in the North. Racial and sexual discrimination in housing, employment, and the military was the norm everywhere. Bi-racial dating and marriage was a scandal, and a felony in half the country. Abortion was a felony. Selling birth control to adults was illegal in much of the country. Selling condoms to minors was illegal in most states. Homosexuals were persecuted, beaten, and murdered, and cops looked the other way, or even took part. Orientals, Hispanics, Blacks, Indians Catholics, Jews, and all women were discriminated against with impunity. Air and water pollution were rampant.

Things are very different now, in most ways, but there’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Russia is apparently still our enemy. Their methods of attack have changed, but they still oppose our democracy. They tried, and maybe succeded in influencing our elections. And now, the FBI says they may have corrupted our president. In my youth, such an accusation would have been enough to impeach him. If not worse. Hopefully, we have learned in the intervening half-century to base our actions on facts, not mere accusations. I hope he can clear himself of this accusation. The idea that a US president might be a Russian agent could be enough to take us right back to the bad old days of hate and fear.