I remember plenty of school fire drills. Back in the day, kids were actually killed in school fires - as happened to 92 kiddos (and 3 nuns) at Our Lady of the Angels (same name as my school!) in Chicago in 1958. This was before there was such a thing as a mass school shootings, so there was no such thing as active shooter drills. Just fire drills.
If there were any Civil Defense "Duck and Cover" drills at my OLA, I don't recall any. But this was the 1950's-1960's, so there must have been a time or two when the fire alarm went off and the nuns told us to stick our heads under our desks and make a perfect Act of Contrition. I just don't remember any.
I think there was a black and yellow Fallout Shelter sign somewhere in the vestibule of our church, indicating that we could hide from an A-bomb in the church's basement. The nuns may have walked us down the hill, in a patrol line, to the church to point it out to us, but I don't think they went so far as to take us into the basement.
Not that we weren't being constantly warned about an impending attack by Russian or Chinese Communists. This was the Cold War we're talking. But mostly the nuns were preparing us for a ground war, not bombs dropping from the heavens skies. What would we do, we were asked, if Commies stormed into our classroom, pointed Kalishnikovs at us, and asked us to deny our faith? Who among us would stand and declare "I am a Catholic" and join the ranks of martydom?
It didn't occur to us to wonder why they'd bother asking, given that they had marauded their way into a classroom to find 50 or so parochial school uniformed kiddos jammed in. A classroom presided over by a nun with giant rosary beads swinging from her waist. A classroom with a prominently displayed crucifix and other religious paraphernalia all over the walls. Even the dullest Commie soldier could probably figure out we were all Catholics.
This was also the era of backyard bomb shelters, but I didn't know anyone who had one. Bomb shelters were middle-class suburban, not blue-collar urban I guess. Maybe it was an economic thing, maybe it was philosophical, with us working stiff types deciding that if A-bombs and, later, nukes were being rained down on our heads, the world just might not be worth surviving.
At least that's how I like to think of it, because that's my philosophical stance on surviving a nuclear apolcalypse. Maybe it's because I don't have kids or grandkids, but when it comes to creating a survival shelter - and, in truth, where would I put one in my 1240 square foot downtown condo - I'm Team What, Me Worry? If the end of the world as we know it is upon us, I want to be at Ground Zero wearing a propeller beanie that says "me first."
Anyway, despite the threats heading our way from Iran, I haven't given a ton of thought to just how much terror we're in for, and whether Trump and/or the Ayatollah are actually capable of unleashing nukes.
Apparently not so for those closer to the know. As I saw in the news a couple of weeks back:
...at least two top Trump administration officials have raced to purchase their own survival shelters designed to withstand an apocalyptic nuclear war scenario, The Telegraph reported on Sunday.
The revelation comes from Texas resident Ron Hubbard, who owns Atlas, a company that manufactures survival bunkers designed to withstand "biological [or] nuclear fallout, EMP attacks” and other catastrophic scenarios. Hubbard spoke with The Telegraph and revealed that since the U.S. attack on Iran, inquiries had gone up “tenfold,” including inquiries from two senior Trump administration Cabinet members.
“One of them texted me yesterday, asking me: ‘When will my bunker be ready?’” Hubbard told The Telegraph, referring to one of the officials. (Source: Raw Story)
Maybe they know something we don't know. After all, plenty of politicos and politico-adjacent swells have been making bank on insider info through both "savvy" stock market trading and making moves in betting-on-anything markets. Didn't I read that a couple of White House-ers made bank by betting on when the old Ayatollah was going to be taken out?
It's not just administration officials, of course. Hubbard has stated "that his recent clients were almost all “Christian, conservative CEOs,” which included “several of the wealthiest men on the planet,” though he declined to identify them."
Hmmmm. Thought these folks were looking forward to The Rapture.
Me? If the doomsday scenarios play out, I hope to rapturously (or not) enter the Big Sleep and call it a day.
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