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Seems like old times Apocalypse ThenBy Rick Horowitz
By the time we were in high school, we could laugh at the absurdity, the mind-numbing futility of the whole thing. Back in grade school, though, nothing about the idea of nuclear annihilation was even remotely amusing. "Shelter drills," they called them in high school, and whenever the signal sounded, we'd file out of our classrooms and down the stairs in search of safe haven from the incoming -- if only hypothetical -- Soviet rockets. Our assigned location, there in the decrepit old building in lower Manhattan, was the ground-floor corridor right outside the auditorium, but just standing in that corridor wasn't good enough; we had to stay clear of the doors to the auditorium. The doors to the auditorium, you see, had windows. It was such a comfort to know, as we hunkered down halfway between Wall Street and the equally inviting targets of Midtown, that in the nanosecond before we were all completely vaporized, we wouldn't have to worry about being cut by flying glass. We could laugh -- and besides, we'd already made it through the Cuban missile crisis, hadn't we? Back in grade school, though, irony was still years in the future. Fear, on the other hand... And there was one week in particular, when the end of the world seemed only hours away. It's taken, these past few days, nothing more than an angry man in a beard and a turban to bring back all the memories. When I listened to the first broadcast of Osama bin Laden's message on Sunday afternoon, I was worried -- who wouldn't be? Even with the halting simultaneous translation, even with the occasionally obscure references, the vows of continued terror were crystal clear. But reading a more formal translation in the next day's papers only made it worse. I'd heard him mention Japan, yes; I'd assumed it was something about those sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway several years ago. A role model? A sign of things to come? Apparently he had larger events on his mind. "They" -- the American infidels, that is -- "have been telling the world falsehoods that they are fighting terrorism. In a nation at the far end of the world, Japan, hundreds of thousands, young and old, were killed and this is not a world crime. To them it is not a clear issue." He was talking, I suddenly realized, about Hiroshima. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only use of nuclear weapons in all of history, and we were the ones who used them. Japan may be our ally now, but bin Laden had latched onto what happened back then for his own cruel purposes. And? Is it time for payback? Does he have the means? (Didn't one of the weekend news programs mention rumors of "suitcase nuclears" missing from the Russian arsenal?) Does he have the will? And if he does, then what? Are we looking at Armageddon? Again? Back in grade school, it was a whisper creeping down the block: Somebody had heard, or somebody had heard from somebody who had heard, that the end was coming, and soon. That some expert -- or was it some psychic? -- who had correctly predicted to the very day and hour the start of World War I and World War II had just disclosed the starting time for World War III: that Friday morning, just after midnight. How it would start -- sneak attack? catastrophic accident? -- we didn't know. Who the expert or psychic was, or where he or she had made this awful announcement, we didn't know. We knew only enough to be totally petrified. Bedtime that Thursday night was prayerful. Sleep was fitful. And when Friday dawned -- when there was a Friday to dawn -- I was amazed, and so, so relieved. Later that morning, at our school's weekly assembly, I noticed one of the other kids from the block sitting several rows away. I looked at him. He looked at me. We shrugged: Still here. We never said another word about it. Forgetting about it is something else again. Posted 10/9/01. Get
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Rick Horowitz
