I was looking at my vintage 70s era globe I still keep in my classroom and I thought about how different it is for me to teach about the Cold War than someone just a few years older than myself.  I think that teachers my age (post 1981) are going to teach it in ways it problably has never been taught. (Not more awesome or anything, just different)  I am probably the only person in my department at schwerk (school/work) who doesn't know what it was like to live through the Cold War, nuclear anxiety etc. I thought of this while reading/watching The Watchmen.  I can't imagine how different it must have been reading that book in the 80s, when the nuclear threat was real.

I remember watching the Berlin Wall come down, and I will be eternally grateful to my parents for forcing their very uninterested 7 year old to sit down and watch the people climb on the cement.  The only thing I could think of the whole time was "He better get down off that wall because he is going to fall and hurt himself."  I also think I remember being told that people in East Germany were not going to have to wait in line for hours to buy toilet paper and I was happy for them.

I have an old bomb shelter in the basement of my house, and to me that is evidence of extreme nuclear anxiety.  But now that the Cold War is "over" can we look back on it and know that our anxieties were unfounded.  I try and tell my kids that we were pretty lucky and that a lot of people worked very hard to make sure that nuclear war never happened.  That feels just about right to me, but I can't know for sure.

Sidenote: a key just fell off the keyboard of my 2 week old computer.  There will be blood.