Do you remember any frightening news reports from when you were a child? How did they impact you? The spring of 1968 was a particularly terrifying time for me. As I related in my Deliverance from Jericho: Six Years in a Blind School memoir, the news reports seemed to portend imminent world-wide disaster. We survived those days but for some of us, the memories remain.-----------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, I became increasingly aware and worried about the events in America at the exact time when we began studying that nation in school. Neddie had informed me about how black people were discriminated against there. I also heard on the radio how civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior was shot in April. The fighting escalated in the Vietnam War, increasing the number of casualties. I was vaguely aware of the riots in America's cities which happened in the previous year but suddenly the unrest appeared more relevant, as did the anti-war protests. Though I lived in Canada, it appeared that the United States and the world were spiralling out of control.
Early one morning, I could not sleep so I listened to Mom's radio with the earphone. That's when I learned that Senator Robert Kennedy was shot. I tuned around the dial and noticed practically every station carried live news coverage. I dreaded hearing what would happen next as well as in the days to come.
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Deliverance from Jericho abounds with vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Please feel free to click on the link to my books or contact me directly for more information about them.
I don't remember anything specific from my childhood, but when I was in college in the 1980's, I was disturbed by talk of possible nuclear war. I had a nightmare once that I was on the phone, and the operator interrupted the conversation, saying that we were under nuclear attack and should take cover. When I went to our basement, my dad told me it was all a joke.
ReplyDeleteI remember practicing Brahms waltzes with the college choir and thinking that it would have been cool to have lived during the composer's time because there was no such thing as nuclear weapons back then. Of course, during those times, there were plenty of other things to worry about, but that didn't occur to me at the time.