Those Who Do Not Learn from History

I am sharply reminded today of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, almost fifty-five years ago. Alarmed by the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba asked the USSR to post missiles off the island to repel further advances. Russia, in retaliation for US missiles in Italy and Turkey, agreed. The US effected a naval blockade to prevent more missiles from reaching Cuba, but that was closing the barn door after the horse. So there we were, sitting ducks with short-range and intermediate-range missiles armed and pointed at our country. It was an interminably long thirteen days, as we went about our daily business almost consumed with fear.

I was in graduate school in Missouri, engaged, and looking forward to marriage. My parents were in Chicago, deemed a major target, and were deaf to my pleas to join my brother and me in Missouri. My father’s long-held philosophy held firm—no bullet had his name on it in WWI and if one did now, so be it. I had friends who were expecting their first child, so it was for them, as for me, the wrong time for the world to end. Young, we have a self-centered view of things. Today, much older, I know that it is always the wrong time. Life is too precious to lose to the folly of men’s egos.

Today I want to dig a deep hole and shepherd my children and grandchildren—and yes, our dogs—into it. Remember the bomb shelters of the 1950s? I once knew a family who bought a rambling 1950s ranch house with a bomb shelter. We laughed then but it doesn’t seem quite so foolish today. Until now, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest mankind had ever come to nuclear war. There is one big difference. Both John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev recognized what was at stake. They entered lengthy negotiations that eventually defused the confrontation. What we as a nation learned was that quick, clear, full communication was necessary, even crucial.

Today we have two petty tyrants shouting insults at one another, like schoolboys in a sandbox. Wiser heads in Washington are counseling the president that he endangers the future of negotiations with Kim Jong Un’s government, but he, like a school-yard bully, seems not to care, not to realize the fate of millions is in his hand. What seems to matter is his own unquenchable thirst for power, to be the biggest, the best, the loudest. It scares me to death.

But I take comfort in the words of William Faulkner in his 1950 speech of acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, yes, but at the height of the Atomic Age, which some call the precursor to the Age of Anxiety, much of which lingers in our national consciousness even today

Faulkner believed it was toxic to creativity to write from a fear so long sustained. Poets, by which he meant all writers, must write from the problems of the heart in conflict with itself. Their words must speak to the heart of long-held values, not of physical fear. His stirring words comfort me to this day: “I decline to accept the end of man … I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” I say those words to myself as I pray for peace and for sane heads to prevail.

We owe the NFL a debt of gratitude. The players who are peacefully trying to call attention to huge problems in our country, have diverted the president’s anger from North Korea to themselves, and they seem willing to bear the burden of that anger and its consequences.