This thread about nuclear power reminded my of something from my childhood.
The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island happened on March 28, 1979. If you weren’t around back then, let’s just say that it was a Very Big Deal. It was all over the news. Everybody was talking about it. Even a 7-year-old like me knew about what had happened and how terrified everybody was.
Fast forward a year or two. I was all set to go to Girl Scout Camp. My parents were planning to drive me there, and were discussing how long it would take to get to Three Mile Island.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
They were sending me to camp at Three Mile Island? Why would there even BE a Girl Scout camp at Three Mile Island???
Needless to say, I was a bit upset.
No no, they explained to me. The camp was at Threemile Harbor, not Three Mile Island.
Well, that did nothing at all to allay my fears, 'cause where would Three Mile Island BE other than in the middle of Threemile Harbor? Even if the camp wasn’t actually on Three Mile Island, it sure didn’t sound too safe to be in the harbor, either.
Well, they finally convinced me that they were two entirely different places, but it took some effort on their part. I think the nautical maps of Threemile Harbor did the trick. There was no Three Mile Island in the vicinity.
Plus, deep down, I really didn’t think my parents would send me to camp at a nuclear accident site.
So, what crazy misunderstandings were caused by current events during your childhood?
Child of the 90s - I thought the OJ Simpson trial was a TV show, and Simpson himself a fictional character.
I also thought for a while that I had met the current president of the US… George Washington. I was about three years old and I think my tour guide at Mount Vernon was a historical reenactor.
As a kid I hear about people getting busted for hash in foreign countries and wonder what those countries had against hash browns.
One of the few times I had cable as a kid I was watching a video for “Give peace a chance”, thought it was from the Beatles, not John Lennon solo, thought John was about 15 to 20 years older than he actually was, and for reasons unknown even to me, thought that all the beetles died in 60’s or 70’s.
At 7, I was a corn-fed Iowa boy. I knew that we were soon moving to some place called New York, but didn’t know much about it. (It was the suburbs of Rochester.)
Then I went with my brother and sister to see West Side Story. Holy Moly, that’s what New York is like? With all the stabbing and killing? (And dancing?) I was pretty scared for a while.
OK, that wasn’t really a a current event.
I remember watching the nightly news, and hearing about how many people were killed in Viet Nam that day. I just assumed that that was normal, and had been going on for hundreds of years, and would keep going on for hundreds more. I couldn’t really understand why I was supposed to care about those particular people, but they must have been pretty important.
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. The way we saw it, there was going to be a war, and if Russia won, we would be their slaves. If we won, we would use the Russians as slaves. Not sure where that idea came from.
I remember everybody in study hall crying because President Kennedy was assassinated and not understanding why they were crying because we were all Lutherans. How’s that for provincial?
Last year (or so) abouts, we took a camping trip in Minnesota with our kids. We referred to where we were going as “the United States”.
Now, said kids (aged 5 and 7) hear about “the United States”, they associate it with the place we went camping - ie the very small part of one state - they have absolutely no idea how vast and diverse that country is. (And, about 3 years ago, we went on a road trip through the western part of Canada and the US, including the very un-Minnesota-like areas of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, but they might not have remembered that.)
(Their grip on geography is pretty tenuous - they think our city is a country (even though, living on the edge of town, we sometimes have to drive a little bit outside the city limits to get to places), when my wife was at an out of town conference on the weekend in another city just 4 hours away and in the same province, they thought she was in another country.)
When I was a kid we were learning about Lewis and Clark in school, and we had to draw a picture of something they had encountered. The one thing that fascinated me was the concept of a “Continental Divide.” So I drew a bunch of white people on a very tall cliff on the right, and a bunch of Indians on a very tall cliff on the left. Between them was this enormous abyss without end, something that literally split the continent in two. The distance between the cliffs was just wide enough so you could get from one side to the other by taking a running leap. I also drew some people who didn’t make it, plummeting to their deaths.
A close friend of mine was born in Scotland in 1941. He spent his early years hearing so much about the war that when it ended in 1945, he remembers that he was actually worried about what life would be like without it.
I was seven at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, and I remember seeing news footage of it and wondering at all the wavy lines on the TV screen. I was certain that we were actually seeing the radiation. My dad eventually explained that it was just poor quality footage.
Perhaps slightly off topic, but it was a continuous story in the news for decades, so…
Preschool age, maybe 3 or 4, in the late 1970s. My mom picked me up from preschool, and I asked her a question that had been gnawing away at me all day. I asked her why the Irish were fighting. She did the best she could to explain the “troubles” in Ireland in sanitized terms I could understand, and that she could muster up from memory. She eventually asked me what brought the question to mind, since she was concerned that I was either being traumatized by her news watching, or that the teachers had perhaps had the TV on that day.
…well, the boyfriend of one of the preschool teachers had stopped in to see her, and he had on a Notre Dame “Fighting Irish” shirt. I was able to read it and understand the words, but obviously didn’t understand the context.
Not a current event but I thought the Underground Railroad was a real railroad that had tracks and everything. So, I imagined a lot of the East Coast had these tunnels running North and South. When I learned the truth, it was a big let-down.
As a small child in the early 80’s I thought (through the evening news as background while I was playing) that Nicaragua was full of rebel gorillas with guns.
When I was very young when I heard the word “War” what sprung to mind was a battle. Two sides lining up their troops on opposite sides of a massive field and going at it until one side is declared winner much like a battle you’d see in Braveheart.
When I heard that WWII lasted 6 YEARS!! OMG!! How can a battle last for 6 years?!?! Don’t people need to sleep and eat?
Well, there were real tunnels in the Underground Railroad, but they were much shorter-- From the basement of a house to a river bank a hundred feet away, or so. If that’s any help.
When I first heard about the Challenger accident (I was one of the few schoolchildren who did not actually see it on TV), I was convinced that the astronauts had managed to get out and take refuge on Skylab, and that we’d be hearing about a rescue soon. Never mind that Skylab had been down for nearly a decade by then; I had so many cool books that talked about it, it had to be up there. Though that probably wasn’t so much a misunderstanding, as good old-fashioned denial.