No Shelter

No Shelter from the Past


In the days of the Cold War, the pervasive anxieties that haunted Americans found many forms of expression. A common question was: How does one plan for a dangerous and uncertain future in which nuclear annihilation seemed a distinct possibility?

Building a bomb shelter was one way that people sometimes answered that question. The government gave advice about how best to accomplish this, and many people took advantage of it. But it was an ostrich-like approach, mostly just suggesting  that you should hide your head in the sand until the danger had passed. It was never very realistic.

We tend to think those days are over. Let’s hope so. But in the globalized world, it’s hard to know if we can ever really stow away the doomsday fears that were once more out in the open.

Modern life -- like life in an earlier era -- is filled with danger of all kinds. Certainly in the post-9/11 world, it is tempting to think about creating spaces to which we can withdraw and  can shut out the danger. This makes us feel better psychologically.

Yet, no amount of precaution and seclusion can keep up totally safe from some ill fate. Perhaps we can reduce the chances of calamity, but we can never completely eliminate the possibility, no matter how thick we build walls and no matter how many times we scan passengers at the airport.

That's not much comfort. But it's reality. As we go about our lives, the choices we make in how we live with that reality may sometimes tell us more about ourselves than we wish to acknowledge.

- G.A.

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Image (above):  A bomb shelter drawing distributed by the U.S. government in the late 1950s. 


This is an edited version of a previously published item.