There were three must-see television events during my college stint in the early 80s (actually four, if you include the release of the Thriller video, which, for those too young to understand, was actually something we waited for with great anticipation.)
In the spring of my freshman year, 1981, American news legend Walter Cronkite gave his final broadcast. I had never watched the news, because my parents didn’t watch the news, and they also made a big point of never having the television on when body counts from the Vietnam War were broadcast. So I didn’t really understand the allure of Cronkite, though of course I knew his name. But even on a college campus at that time it was a huge deal and there were dorm viewing parties that evening as Cronkite signed off the air, intoning for the final time, for all of America to hear, “and that’s the way it is.”
In the winter of my junior year, after an unprecedented 11 seasons on the air, the brilliant television series, M*A*S*H, aired its final episode. To this day it remains one of the most watched television events of all time. I spent nearly a decade of my life adoring M*A*S*H with my mother, both of us swooning over the charm and brilliance of Alan Alda (over whom I swoon to this day.) It was an extraordinary show, and for those of us weaned on the banality of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island reruns, it was the first show that used humor in a sophisticated and serious way, both to amuse and to address things happening in our world. We were still reeling from the specter of Vietnam and grateful that the draft had not been reinstated. M*A*S*H had helped us navigate those fears. We watched the final episode in community and felt like we were losing a good friend.
The final television event that shaped my college years was the airing of The Day After, in the fall of 1983 - my senior year. Most of that year was dedicated to senior theses and ice cream, Trivial Pursuit and MTV, but this was different. The Day After was a made-for-tv movie about the fallout from a nuclear attack. My friends and I had grown up in the shadow of the nuclear age, distressed and worried about annihilation for most of our childhoods. It shaped our view of the world as a scary and dangerous place, and our leaders as ill-equipped to manage the potential destruction of humankind.
I watched The Day After, frightened and stressed, and immediately tucked it away in a mental drawer, too upset to take it out and think about the true ramifications of its message. Perhaps, if we were lucky, the nuclear age would not end in complete eradication of life as we knew it. The meltdown at Three Mile Island had already shown us that, while potentially fatal, things could also be contained. We were on the verge of the go-go 80s, and it seemed inconceivable that our young and hopeful lives could be blown away.
And, in fact, it did not happen. No one pushed the button. We got to live out those young and hopeful lives. In the nearly 40 years since I watched The Day After, also in community with my friends, the world has not been destroyed by a rogue dictator and nuclear bombs. Instead, we are trapped inside our homes, unsure as to when we’ll be able to emerge, because of a raging pandemic, one that has the power to change everything as we know it. Not by human might but by natural circumstance, my childhood nightmares have been realized after all.
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The day my husband slumped from a seizure that was caused by a fatal brain tumor is the day that I mark my own personal before and after. My life will be forever divided into what happened before that day and what has happened after. This spring of Covid-19, the spring that marks the beginning of such profound changes in our world as to be unimaginable, now will be the global equivalent – our collective before and after.
My young adult children are not going to get to live out those young and hopeful lives in the same way we did. They don't get the benefit of a pause button. Instead, they are going to live out the rest of their lives remembering everything that happened the day before they had to put a full stop on those lives and their plans. We still don’t know what will happen next. We don’t know if they will be able to complete their college years as hoped and planned, on pretty campuses in the presence of other students, or if the rest of their education will be sequestered on computer screens and in zoom classrooms.
We don’t know if they will be able to ever go to a baseball game again, or a concert, or a restaurant, without precautions – protective gear, swab tests, temperature taking. Or at all, for that matter. Will we ever see large gatherings again in our lifetimes?
We don’t know what the workplace will look like. Schools. Town squares. The way we worship. Everything is subject to change, to reinterpretation given the new reality. Relationships are shifting too, under the weight of total togetherness. Or, as in my life, complete distance. I don’t know when I’ll see my beloved again, and when we do, what this separation will have done to us.
Our choices as parents, as grandparents, as citizen of the world, are all going to be affected. Will we travel again? Will we find ways to visit our families and friends that are safe? How will we take care of aging relatives who are far away? How will we receive medical care? What happens if we need to go to the emergency room?
Everything is in reset. Everything we understood about the way the world works is no longer relevant. When my husband wound up in the hospital for a month at the beginning of his illness, and we learned that he was going to die no matter what we did, I felt that I had tumbled down the rabbit hole. I’ve never completely made my way back out. Nothing I knew and understood before that day makes sense anymore. I’ve had to completely retool my understanding of the mechanisms of the world, both at a macro level and in the quotidian. I’m still reeling from that tilt, learning how to navigate a life that exists, in many ways, on a different plane.
And so will we all. The day after is here, and we are peeking out from under our bunkers, blinking and unsure about the next step. Because of our devices, which offer the wonder of Netflix and Zoom meetings, but have also completely changed our viewing patterns and eliminated family viewing time, we are isolated and siloed in a way that would have been unconceivable the evening the entire country, in unison, watched Walter Cronkite look up from his notes, and tell us, in his deep and reassuring voice, “And that’s the way it is.”
And that’s the way it is.
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