Plath County Junior High School in the final years of the Cold War. Reagan was in, Ollie was everybody�s hero, and the Bomb sat like a smug toad ninety miles north of us at the SAC base.
Every one of us kids had his or her own personal relationship with the Bomb. It was the Enemy. It was all that stood between us and Communism. It was the Memento Mori. For the military kids, it was their Dad�s Boss. It was a cryptic quasi-deity, reflecting back at us what we projected onto its mirrored surface. For me, it was an incredibly powerful symbol, the symbol of despair and death, but--perversely--also of excitement, chaos, and the unknown.
I obsessed over it. Like most of my classmates, I was certain the war would be soon, and sometimes I imagined surviving it. There would be a flash, then the air would burn, and then I�d look up and see that mushroom cloud. Everything would change in ways no one could imagine, from the long winter to the strange twisted mutations that were bound to appear everywhere. More often, my thoughts about the Bomb concerned the constant dreadful threat of it, not knowing when I might glance out the window to see a mushroom cloud or awaken to thousand-sunned light pouring into my bedroom. Sometimes I almost wished they�d just do it and get it over with. Have a global catharsis, the release of total breakdown. By looming over us all like that, the Bomb became my generation�s bogeyman.
Nobody ever tells you what to do when your bogeyman goes away.
After the end of the Cold War, it was as if all that collective fear we poured into our images of nuclear hell had nowhere to go. Faced with the prospect of living long enough to move away from home, Gen Xers swirled around in anomie.
As soon as the Bomb was gone, other bogeymen rose to take its place. Many of the new threats were diseases, visions of plagues that lacked the drama of the Bomb. Others had the catastrophic imagery of the nuclear threat, without any human involvement--asteroid impacts and sudden shifts of the Earth�s crust. But none of these new bogeymen has scared as many people, or focused their fears as intensely, as the Bomb. There�s no image of catharsis or violent adventure in these threats; they�re really just exaggerations of the torments of everyday life, sickness, accidents, and the like. Catastrophe has lost its heady glow, and where we used to have the Sword of Damocles hanging above us, now we�re the blindfolded lady in an old-fashioned knife throwing show, trusting that the knives will not scratch us as they whistle by.
Sometimes I miss the Bomb.
