Internet Anthropologist Think Tank: Halloween fear: context

We all love to be scared when we know we are really safe, roller coaster rides and scary movies for example.

This Halloween I was thinking of the scariest movie I had ever saw, the movie I just couldn't take and had to leave the Theater, in front of my friends, it was so scary they left with me.

But first the context, The atom bomb had just happened before I was born, so I grew up with

the atom bomb, note I said atom not Nuclear, nuclear bombs came later.

Any thing "atom" was hot leading science at the time.

At the county fair they even had some guy operating remote hands/fingers they could use to handle radio active materials, you could play chess with him while he used the contraption to move the chess pieces.

And in school we actually practiced "duck and cover" the Nun would holler "atom bomb"

and the kids would all scramble under our desks for safety.
We learned an atomic attack could come at any time, and we had to be prepared to "duck and cover" at a seconds notice to try and live.

And everyone had to know where the public fall out shelters were.

I grew up with the background of mutually assured destruction.

And radio activity was something new, exciting and scary.

My chemistry set had a radio active tube you could look into in the dark and see a spark occasionally?

I have no idea what it was? That may accoun t for my eye sight now, lol.

And you could get your shoe measured by radio active X-rays, you put your foot into the machine and it could look right thru your foot.

I knew a lot of Japanese died from radio activity, more than from the actual explosion, I had heard.

If there were a atom war, every one would die and those who didn't were condemned to terrible deaths, the GROUND/DIRT would be radio active and could kill you, and you couldn't grow food even.

We had even heard of genetic mutation.

With this childhood back ground I and my buds went ot see this HORROR movie,

we steeled our selves, and tried to keep our nerves steady in preparation for what we were about to see, THIS COULD, maybe, ACTUALLY HAPPEN TO US.

As we were a very brave group we sat right down up front, nothing between us and what was happening on the screen.

And at the crucial moment in the movie when we actually saw it happening our little hearts

were racing and blood pressure pumped to the cealing, we just couldn't take it, it was actually happening, we could see it, and I could no longer take the truth of what I was seeing and had

to leave the darkened theater for the light of day, get it out of my mind.
We just went to get some ice cream, no one talked about what we saw.

I had saw it and it scared the Hell out of me, I thought I might throw up.

I saw this poor guy exposed to radiation and he grew to 50 feet.

"Attack of the 50 foot man" The old one in black and white.

I don't know if the US propaganda scarred the Russians, but it scared the hell out of us kids.

"CONTEXT"

Happy Halloween.

Gerald

Still scared of radiation.