"This is the way the world ends..."

The obvious poem, but apt:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Ignore the momentous explosions and panic, and imagine the squandering of ten-millenia of human 'civilization', and the eon this biosphere has endured since the last ice-age: it amounts to a 'whimper'.  I turned nineteen in 1989, the year 'the West' squandered, but I lived my youth doomed: that scene above was going to be my future.  We've forgotten.

Stupid humans.  I can't imagine why we think this threat has gone away, even if the 'Eastern Block' conceded, out of more sanity than 'the West' ever gave them credit for, and so less deserving of Western triumphalism than we'd like.  The further you remove yourself from an American reading of history, the more the Cold-War aggressor the same America looks: Trotsky and Stalin were long dead, there was always little threat of 'universal communism', and much more for communism to fear from us (and so it turned out).  We all have reasons for our politics, for our relationship to authority and dogma, but though I idiotically identified as a 'conservative' then, learning my life depended on the whim of sociopaths has a lot to do with my very different politics now.  I finished high school well enough to get into a decent university, but I can't say I was ever driven.  Thinking back, I wonder how much bovine faith you had to have before 1989 to be driven for a future.  They were right, but it was a close run thing; you can flip heads five times in a row...

If you're much under forty, or have a bad memory, watch some clips on this page of nuclear war movies.  Poor taste in music and clothing, and the abyss: the 1980s.