Stop Abuse Now!

Today is the day that bloggers all over the world are writing about Abuse. Thinking about all the different kinds of abuse there are is simply overwhelming.

Things were so much simpler when I was a little girl. Families consisted of a Mama and a Daddy, with Grandparents, Aunts, and Uncles living nearby for many of us. People who got divorced were uncommon enough to be talked about in whispers. Not that our world was perfect in the good old days. We had our scary times, like learning how to duck under a school desk during an Atomic Attack drill. Our larger world was ruled by the Cold War, fear of polio, and the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement.

But it was different at home. I was safe, and I knew it.

This post is for all those precious children who do not know what that feels like. They come home from school to hear their parents fighting over next to nothing. They cringe when a family member comes near, because they don't want to be touched or beaten again. We played Hide and Go Seek. Now, so many little children just hide and pray that no one finds them.

Let us do what needs to be done, so they can feel safe in their own homes. Let them be children.

This post is one of several hundred about Abuse of all kinds you can readhere.

Cold War Memories - Like Duck and Cover Was Going to Help??

I was born near the end of World War II, so my early childhood memories are filled with images of the Cold War and the fears that those images evoked. I remember that we used to have spend-the-night parties at one of my girlfriend's houses, and we slept in the basement. One whole wall was lined with shelving, neatly stacked with all kinds of survival goods.

There was a family in the next block who had their own bomb shelter in their back yard.

All the big buildings in downtown Birmingham had the Fallout Shelter Sign on them, which looked like a radioactive warning triangle, except it was bright yellow. Stockpiled in the basements of these public buildings were all kinds of K rations and supplies, supposedly to house the population while we waited for it to be safe to come out after an atomic attack.

When we went to the movies there were always Newsreels and cartoons before the feature movie. The cartoons were fun, but often the newsreels were pictures of the latest tests of the atomic bomb, or news of tests the Russians had made. I don't remember my school ever teaching us to do the Duck and Cover drill for nuclear attack, but I do remember seeing the drill on the newsreels.

The scariest of all were the newsreels showing the testing of the atomic bombs on the mockup American town built out in the desert. I can still see the heat wave passing across the roof tops and the houses dissolving in front of me over and over.

Growing up during the Cold War meant growing up with a pervasive sense of insecurity and paranoia.