I've been reading a lot of Barbara Trapido recently. In Noah's Ark (1984) Noah is preparing for a trip to New York and he asks his wife if there are any cartons of orange juice that he can take with him, as he never gets enough to drink on the plane. His wife then reminds him to bring scissors to open the cartons. How strange that sounds now. Noah might find himself in Gitmo if he tried doing that today.
Then in Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) Jane Goldman smokes a cigarette and drinks a glass of wine. And she's pregnant! No one blinks an eye in 1982. Nowadays her unborn child would be placed on an At Risk Register.
It was in the early 80s that we thought we were all going to die in a nuclear accident, disaster, war, whatever. Maybe we still will. Who knows? If we survived that then our lives would be blighted, our babies blinded by genital herpes. Once Aids came along herpes was never talked about. Now Aids, in this continent anyway, is hardly mentioned and we're all going to die from obesity or die out because of chlamydia or contraceptives in the water supply.
And yes - I do worry about global warming and the environment. But not that much. Because in twenty years time we'll all be worrying about something else altogether. That's if we're still here.
4 comments:
The part we don't seem to have figured out yet is that we are all going to die of something.
As will the earth - sometime.
I was a young whippersnapper in the early 80s and I too felt that the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust. Then when I got older I realised that it was just one of the many ways we are kept living in fear to make us more easy to manipulate.
That is exactly what I feel. The scaremongering is, at least partially, an attempt at social control.
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