Flashback to ca. 1986

When I saw this headline on Friday, March 4, saying "Russia took over Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Radiation normal" I thought I was beamed back to my teenage years. Those were the heydays of the Cold War and really scary (to an angst-ridden teenager anyway) propaganda both from the US and the USSR. There was a lot of talk of somebody accidentally (or on purpose) pressing the ominous button that would evaporate all of humanity and apocalyptic films like "The Day After" were shown to students who would have nightmares for months afterwards. 

I vividly remember the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and that we stopped eating liver and mushrooms for a long time. It was all very disturbing and when the Berlin Wall came down I naively thought that there was no East/West divide any more and that "the Russians" were not the villains they had been for decades. All the other conflicts that were to follow, with some of them geographically pretty close like the war in Yugoslavia that seemed like a never-ending news headline in the 1990s, didn't feel as scary and threatening to me as the Cold War years had been. 

I was your average teenager who was way more interested in how the cute classmate could be made to finally notice that I was meant for him than in current affairs, but the aggressive rhetoric on both sides and the well-known presence of nuclear weapons was hard to escape and it scared the shit out of me. Probably I should be really scared now, but somehow it all feels like a bizarre play developing in front of our eyes that is just beyond belief. The difference to the 1980s is that there is such an onslaught of information on so many channels and that first-person accounts are just a swipe or click away. 

When I posted my wedding invitations recently, I thought the biggest threat to that event taking place was a horrible Covid variant that would see us in yet another lockdown and possibly also torrential rain. Well...