Duck and Cover (from the 1950's--shown to kids)

I think the grown-ups of the 1950's very well-meaningly messed-up some young kids' minds with this sort of thing. I went to school in the '70's and '80's--we didn't go through this. We just understood we could be vaporized, but it never felt real. We understood "duck and cover" wouldn't really do anything--you'd just be dead.

But what are they talking about? A coat? Getting under a table? Really? What was the point of this?

"Glass may fly through the air, and it may cut you!" "Even a thin cloth can save you."

WTF? I mean seriously--WTF? Were they trying to calm kids down by making them feel like they had some control of a possible scary situation? Or were they pre-conditioning them to adopt a defensive posture in the face of potential threat--that "duck and cover" would become a coping mechanism that would be generally used in disasters not necessarily as dire as "the bomb's coming?" Get down, follow instructions, avoid danger.

I don't get it, myself. My world was entirely different growing up. When I was six, I had a first grade teacher who would count down the days of the hostage crisis in Iran. My dad and his contemporaries went through the draft during the Vietnam War--most served. I watched M*A*S*H* on tv. War was a thing people did to each other, and the idea of a nuclear war was just....in hindsight, not anything I absorbed as plausible. This film doesn't talk in terms of "if" but "when".

I wonder if stuff like that programmed some people for feelings of inevitability about nuclear war. I wonder if the enormity of that legacy makes people search out another big enemy on the horizon because it feels more natural than just assuming that various actors on the international scene are playing roles so much as trying to sort out various needs.

Just weird stuff I think about. When I'm not reading sf and eating weird things.