Political Winter

In October 1962, I was only three years old. I wasn’t exactly sure what atom bombs were and only had a vague idea of where Cuba was.

But I knew something was wrong. My older brother, then six, came home with tales of air raid drills, of children hiding under their desks. I remember seeing a somber President Kennedy talking on the television set.

Most of all, I knew that my parents were worried. There were no fabulous Bible stories that night to entertain me and my brothers. Only my mother hugging me sadly as we sat on one of the boys’ beds, while my father stood nearby, graver than usual.

If she thought we weren’t going to live to grow up, she wouldn’t have had us, my mother said. It wasn’t fair to us. Was it really worth all this risk, all this anxiety? My father said the president had done the right thing, that he’d stood up to the Russians.

I knew it had something to do with ships out on the ocean that weren’t going to be allowed to dock on an island south of Florida. That the American ships wouldn’t let them pass.

That one way or the other, my father said, it would mean war and the end of America as we know it. Russia couldn’t be allowed to store those missiles in Cuba.

My mother asked how long it would take for the missiles to arrive? Not very long, my father replied. Not very long at all. Would there be enough time to get us children in the car and drive to safety?

With enough warning, he thought, we might be able to drive just far enough north to get out of harm’s way. But he didn’t think the government would sound any warning at all, in spite of all the drills. An alert would cause lots of panic but not much else.

He also thought having children like Billy hide under desks was absurd. That would be no protection at all. He’d heard about the tests in Los Alamos and so had Grandpa (Mom’s father). And of the after-effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

We lived outside of New York City. Just far enough away to know what was happening but not far enough away to get away in time.

But the crisis was averted and our family lived happily everafter. At least until now. Freedom prevailed, barely, through the Sixties. But communism was on the march, with our young people tearing down their own flag, as Kruschev predicted.

I remember the shoe-banging incident at the United Nations, too.

No one needs to bang any shoes today.

Sixteen days ago, the House of Representatives passed the Health Care Reform and today, Obama vowed to destroy all our nuclear weapons in the United States in the name of world peace. No mother need hug her daughter in fear of a nuclear winter.

Another sort of winter is fast approaching us, though – a political winter. This storm’s winds will wreak as much damage as any physical maelstrom, uprooting the trees of liberty, sweeping away homes and families, smashing windows, ripping away roofs, and devastating the country.

Civilization will be turned over to the savages and barbarians. Crime will rule the streets and anarchy our highways and byways. Cities and towns once orderly and peaceful will be left in ruins. Our prosperity will be looted and left strewn in the gutters.

Our gardens will be trampled, our orchards stripped bare of fruit and leaf. The winds of change will howl through their barren branches. Birds will no more warble to the west wind in their boughs nor children climb to their heights.

A frost will leave our landscape barren. Words will be weighed carefully. We will all march to the beat of a single, relentless drummer. No dissent will be allowed, no deviation from the frozen track laid carefully before our feet.

There will be no warmth among neighbors; only suspicion and distrust. Children will not be free to gambol. Our time will be measured out for us. Our days will be long and our nights all too short. The fire of freedom will be stomped out and we’ll be left to freeze.

Men of great wealth will sit contentedly upon their hoards, glorying in the power they’ve accumulated. They will reap what we have sown and deliver it to their devotees, lazy, ignorant, and unprincipled.

We will serve as slaves at their pleasure and bow to their dictates. If this life seems familiar, know that in the autumn we only tasted the augur of this austerity. The tempest has only begun to toss us about, helpless and frustrated.

Any defenses we might have had, any supplies, any arsenal, whether financial, emotional, political, physical will be torn from us. Those nuclear weapons Obama wishes to ban were the sentinels against a political holocaust that is now breaking over us. The calamity they were built to prevent surges around us like a tsunami wave, drowning freedom, democracy, and capitalism.

Any foreign army will be able to march upon our shores without a challenge. Waves of illegal immigrants may flood over our borders. Criminals, vagrants, thieves, and their ilk will have free reign over us.

Nothing will stop them from robbing us and enslaving us in our own country. Obama bowed down to foreign potentates all over the world, and now he will surrender our last, best, if nightmarish, defense against tyranny and oppression.

Hilary Clinton, I believe, said that we have no need of nuclear weapons in this day and age. No indeed, for the communists, the Marxists, the socialists have their victory and their champion in Barack Obama.

He has won a bloodless, radiation-free coup against the free world. Why would he launch nuclear weapons against countries such as Russia and China, Cuba and Venezuela, whom he regards as allies?

We have met the enemy – and he is our president.