Postwar America

During World War II, our U.S, Army Chief of Staff was George S. Marshall. During his duty time, he appointed General Eisenhower and General Patton to lead our American troops into victory against the third reich of Germany and against the madman hitler who had taken control of Germany in 1933. What seems funny to me, as a baby boomer who entered this world in 1951, is that Ike appointed a "Marshall" to get the Europeans repositioned for democratic governance in postwar Europe. He hatched a plan, "the Marshall Plan", that worked very well toward getting the Europeans back on their civilized feet.

Our Allied nations had a sticky mess to clean up there. Someone, probably a journalist, came up with the phrase, "The Cold War." But this cold war thing was truly unprecedented. For the first time in history, two arch-rivals, the USA and the USSR, formerly allies, emerged from the holocaust with the biggest guns ever devised by Man: "atom bombs" we called them. Nowadays we call them nukes. Our nation, the United States of America, founded upon the bedrock of Freedom and individual Dignity, found ourselves in a worldwide rivalry withs the Russian communists. And with the unprecedented presence of nukes in the worldwide ballgame, the whole world was paranoid that one of the big nukes might be launched somewhere. I mean, we - the yanks of the USA - had demonstrated, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what the damn thing could do.  When I was in grade school, we had practice drills where we'd stick our heads under the school desk so that we'd know what to do if the real thing happened. (God forbid!) In God we trust! I mean, we had the Cuban missile crisis; and the paranoid Ruskies built a wall in Berlin to keep their walled-in krauts from escaping the "Iron Curtain" (That's what Eisenhower called the line between Soviet eastern Europe and western Europe.) 

Eastern Euro countries were controlled by USSR as police states until later. . . . Gorbachev and Yeltsin eventually loosened the soviet grip; the wall came down. Thank God. And thank you, Mikail and Boris. Nuclear paranoia eventually subsided into low tide as the frosty commie countries thawed and joined the rest of the western world's celebration of freedom. Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Romanians. . . . . all of them eventually joined the European Union. What a relief! And the whole nuke scare died down. We hardly hear anything about that stuff any more, except for an occasional, idle red-scare thought about what Vlad the Mad might do.  The glass half-Full perspective, looking back on it . . . is, in the Cold War period of the 20th century. . . that the use of nuclear fission is now a process by which citizens of our planet can have electricity. . . not atomic war. Let's keep it that way. Speaking of witch. . . I mean, thank God that the Chernobyl scare didn't go full blast disaster! Aren't you glad? But every now and then we should remind Vlad Putin of that favorable development, and that we, as citizens of the world, need to keep it that way. We need to keep our nukes generating power for civilized life, not the destruction of it. Glass half-Full