Stupid useless ritual

down2earth

down2earth

Member
Does anyone remember "Duck & Cover" from the 1950's? I was 8 years old in 1956 and my third grade teacher would make us practice "Duck & Cover" drills where we would pretend that Russian planes were dropping bombs on us. We would crawl under our wooden desks to protect us. Naturally, the high quality of those wooden desks would keep us safe if the school building was being vaporized by Russian hydrogen bombs. Oh, by the way, those desks would also keep us safe from radiation and shock waves. I remember feeling vulnerable at home. What if the Russians dropped a hydrogen bomb on my house? I didn't have my school desk to protect me!!!
 

You only think it was a wasteful drill because you never had to use it. I grew up in a house where might makes right so believe duck and cover saved me on many occasions!
 
We didn't have those... my school years were '63 to '75 and maybe they were still happening, but not in my school. And now they have active shooter drills in schools that those kids will be remembering 50 years from now on a forum somewhere.
 
I remember it. We thought it was great fun crawling around on the floor and shielding ourselves from imaginary flying glass. We made jokes about blowing up the the school, as if that were the only target.
 
Knight said:
I'm pretty sure that was an exercise to make a kid flexible enough to kiss their ass good bye.
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Me too. What it taught little ones was that we were at the mercy of something or someone at some unpredictable moment. But when you saw your classmates giggling under their desks and crawling back out from under them smiling and ready to study or play, you smiled too, because now you knew for sure there was no such thing as The End of Days, or the annihilation or vaporization of every man, woman and child, and that maybe the Atomic Bomb was a lie.

@JustDave - Yep.
 
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We had those AND (living in tornado alley) tornado drills. Tornado drills consisted of sitting in the halls with our heads twixt our knees.

Add those to the fire drills where we marched down the stairs and out to the playground, while the music teacher played "Onward Christian Soldiers" over the loudspeakers. Of course, no one was allowed to get their coats from the cloakroom, so that was a real delight when there was two feet of snow on the ground and it was 10 degrees fahrenheit. In nice weather, it was a real treat once you got over the initial fear that, this time, it might be a real fire.
 
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But here's the thing - our gov't hadn't yet funded building public bomb shelters. The idea was proposed, and England's success during WWll was used as an example, but to this day we don't have a bunch of federally funded bomb shelters all over the country. And very few states built them.

Those Duck and Cover practices were basically used to prepare us while the federal gov't mulled over a few realistic plans and actions to protect the general public, but they never settled on anything, probly because the $cost$ was massive. They came up with a plan to protect important people, but not the general public.
 


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