The Day After

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The Day After

In 1983, I was in eleventh grade when ABC aired The Day After. It was the thick of the Cold War and the movie’s premise, about a nuclear war between members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, seemed less sci-fi and more “this could totally happen.” We talked about it in school, and my sister and I had vivid discussions about what we would do if/when a nuclear bomb fell (run right into its path, because you wouldn’t want to be one of the post-apocalyptic survivors during the nuclear winter.) Everybody, but everybody, watched that movie and talked about it, and it was all over the news.

And for a little while I was a super stressed teenager full of fear and foreboding who believed that the future was out of my control. I was convinced my generation was more screwed than any that came before me.

Until my mother figured out what was going on, and said something simple but profound. “Oh, Nancy. When I was a kid, we were actually FIGHTING World War 2. I grew up doing bomb drills at school. I promise you: Every generation has something to worry about, and it always turns out ok.”

Whether or not she feared thought The Day After could happen, Mom’s absolute unwillingness to be unsettled by it, her matter-of-fact belief that this was just a temporary cross for my generation to bear and nothing worse, took all the teeth out of my fear. Five years later, I found myself at the Berlin Wall, literally hammering away the last vestiges of Cold War policy, and on the cusp of a couple of decades of unprecedented cooperation between the two protagonists of The Day After.

I bring up this story because our children are super stressed in the aftermath of the presidential election and I’m not sure we’re doing a very good job reminding them to have hope. We need to do better.

And when I say “we,” I mean “I.” On the night of the election I was in bed in the fetal position by 9 pm, too traumatized to reach up and turn the lights off. When our younger daughter opened the bedroom door to check on me, I could only sputter, “I’m ok, honey, just tired,” and then I proceeded to not sleep for, what’s it been, five weeks now? I groan audibly as I scroll my Facebook feed or read the paper. I pass along stories to both girls of family friends who are considering moving from the high-priced Bay Area because their government jobs or their Obamacare is threatened. I’m doing a pretty terrible job of assuring my daughters that everything will be ok.

But we have to believe our kids have a future, because how can they believe in it if we don’t?

Maybe that’s why I’m finding that right now, the moments when I feel like I’m doing the best parenting are when I model some sort of helpfulness, when I take action in spite of the overwhelm. It’s been raining a lot in the Bay Area lately so I keep our car’s glovebox stocked with clean, dry socks. When we roll up to an intersection where someone is panhandling, we open the window and hand out a pair or two to someone for whom dry socks mean a lot. The girls are usually the ones to spot the opportunity first, popping open the glove box and holding the socks at the ready.

Only in those moments do I feel like I’m showing them a path of how to we make it out of this particular nuclear winter. Only in those moments am I showing them that despite feeling disappointed and worried about the election, there are small actions that I myself can take every day to restore normalcy, and to model decency and kindness.

More than the protesting policies we find repugnant and presidential appointments we find abhorrent, more than the donating of funds to organizations we know will be threatened, maybe we adults have one job even more important: keeping hope alive in our kids.

And reassuring them that there will, in fact, be many days after today.

Fun fact: this was the Number One song on the Billboard charts the week before and after The Day After. I believe Lionel Richie’s pants were part of the nuclear deterrent strategy.

L I O N E L R I C H I E – a l l n i g h t l o n g from don avetta on Vimeo.