The End of the World — For Real

Contemporary history has a few days about which everyone who was alive at that time remembers where they were and what they were doing. Chief among them: the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, and September 11, 2001. For many Boomers, there is another day, forgotten within the recesses of time; the day the world was going to end… really going to end. This was not a drill.

On Monday, October 22, 1962, word spread across the country that President Kennedy had called congressional leaders to Washington, and was going to make a major speech. As I sat in history class that afternoon, our teacher, Mrs. Frances Humphreys, announced that news, explained the situation with the Soviet Union, and summed things up with the chilling words, “This is exactly what the President has to do to declare war.”

US relations with the Soviet Union were terrible — worse than they are today in spite of what our pop-culture news might claim. Nikita Khrushchev had told the US, “We will bury you,” and he meant it. Russia and the US were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, and people were building bomb shelters at a rapid pace. We knew a nuclear war was un-survivable, and now we were on the brink of one.

I rode the bus home that day, and spent the next several days, in a silent fog of disbelief, contemplating the fact that not only I might not survive such a conflict, but also that the entire world might be ending… for real.

Now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, this terrifying event that took the world to the brink of annihilation ended peacefully. However, no one, not even President Kennedy knew how things would turn out. Even though we all survived, it does not change the fact that every living person back then went through something no one, before or after, has experienced: the fact that the end of the world was imminent. Further exacerbating the impact, the Boomers went through it as adolescents and children, forever leaving them with that scarring memory. No wonder that generation went on to implore the world, “give peace a chance.”