There’s this song that I keep wandering back to these days.
…this old world keeps spinning ‘round. It's a wonder tall tree ain’t layin’ down. There comes a time…
I discovered this song right in the middle of the last time I worried about nuclear war. I worried a lot about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I liked this song a lot, so these two evocative constructs – the annihilation of our earth and the inarguable truth that the earth would keep turning even if our species royally screwed it all up – became both soothingly and of course paradoxically linked.
I was 17, after all. There were girls to meet and concerts to attend and books to read and more of Neil Young (the author of those lyrics) to discover. I felt somewhere between angry and nihilistic to think that once again the blundering and hot-headed “adults-with-power” were going to ruin my and everyone else’s fun.
In attempting to cope with these swirling worries, an uncomfortable thing happened to me in my younger years. I lost hours in the college library perusing sterile books about horrible weapons. I hadn’t heard the term Weapons of Mass Destruction (or much less the now infamous acronym WMD’s), but I was drawn with fetish-like passion to read about what would happen if “fill-in-the-blank” took place. The atomic bomb…the hydrogen bomb…the neutron bomb… anthrax…saran…napalm scorching American Maples. I was a self-imposed Manchurian Candidate, fully intending to study poetry or organic chemistry, but there I’d find myself, not even sure how I got there, in the sun-less section of the stacks reserved for understanding the End of the World. I organized the potential destruction into a kind of ruined hierarchy. The neutron bomb felt almost peaceful. It is strange to me how repulsed I am by these memories. I have children now.
But literature came to my rescue. I experienced a strangely smarmy satisfaction when I turned back to my assigned studies during my freshman year and came across Shelly’s Ozymandias. I first read that poem in 11th grade and have never stopped loving it.
My name is Ozymandias, Kings of Kings! Look upon my works, Ye might, and despair!
Ha. Screw you, Ozymandias. You should have listened to more Neil Young.
I’m just spit-balling right now. You know, thinking out loud. And I’m thinking about how much the current heated rhetoric of our leaders has got to be messing with the psyches of our children. I know that it is shallow, perhaps even crass, for me to worry about my largely privileged offspring. But still, they’re MY kids. I worry. I don’t want them drawn to the sun-less and sterile stacks of the library because they figure that they might as well picture what they worry is inevitable.
Fearless leaders, take note. A little less with the fearlessness, huh? A little less with the swagger. It isn’t reassuring. I write this regardless of political views. As a parent and as a child psychiatrist and as a citizen of this troubled planet, I can tell you with gut-punched certainty that we are not doing our children any favors these days. Let’s tone it down some, shall we? Our kids will sleep better, and we at least owe them that.