So I was leaving my Dynamics class today and me and a fellow student were passing by one of the dorms. I saw something that I hadn’t noticed before, the familiar old sign with the black circle and three triangles. I told my fellow student that I didn’t know that Miller Hall was a fallout shelter and he asked, “What’s a fallout shelter?”
I explained to him that in the advent of a nuclear war when we saw the blast, we could duck and cover, and if we survived the wind, we could go to the fallout shelter to wait until we ran out of food and supplies or the radiation in the fallout had dropped to safe levels. He looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues, so to break an awkward silince, I said, “You don’t know dick about the Cold War, do you?”
He said that he was only nineteen, so I told him about fears of imminent nuclear annihilation and a time when the enemies of this country dressed in snappy uniforms and marched around Red Square and we knew that they had WMD’s because they went on parade with them every chance they got every chance they got. I told him that the War on Terror was nothing compared to the MAD initiative and that George W. was just trying to do for Haliburton what the Cold War did for General Dynamics and Vietnam did for Bell Helicopter and that if China took Taiwan in the next few years, he’d better keep his grades up.
I am an old man going to college ranting about the old days. I have become what I loathed.
