In a recent posting on the blog At One with the World, the writer expresses her feelings regarding the end of the Castro reign in Cuba, along with the end of other scourges of the 20th Century. “There are so many things that I have seen in my lifetime that I swore were beyond my wildest imagination,” she writes. “In the 70’s, I never thought to see the end of Apartheid in South Africa, or Nelson Mandela a free man; I never thought to see the Berlin Wall come down and the unification of Germany; I never thought to see the break up of the Soviet Union; and I never thought I would live to see Castro step down from ruling Cuba on his own accord.”
I couldn’t agree more with her sentiments. As a child, I was raised to fear the Russians. My early school memories are filled with visions of air raid practices. When the fire alarm sounded with a certain pattern, I would be directed to either line up in the coat closet or crouch beneath my desk, at all times covering my head to protect it from falling debris. I recall one day in second grade coming home from school explaining how the teacher said that if the boats coming to Cuba didn’t turn around that day, the world was going to end. Our homework was to pray that evening that it didn’t. Five years later, on the first day of the Middle East War of 1967, I remember boarding the school bus for the ride home. A fellow student said matter of factly, “Did you hear? World War III just started today.” Such were the carefree “Happy Days” of the 60s.
Decades later, watching on TV as the statue of Lenin fell to the ground, it was hard to believe the fears of my childhood could be ended so quickly and in some ways uneventfully. I felt the same hearing the news of Castro.
Today’s generation has a new fear. They live with the fear that at any moment a terrorist attack could kill them or their loved ones. I only hope that one day, they too, can see the end to the scourge of their age. As noted on At One with the World, “All things are possible.”
