LETTERS: DESPITE FEARS, WE SURVIVED 20TH CENTURY

To the editor:

While watching a TV news magazine segment about how we really have no defense to a nuclear bomb being sent our way, I had a flashback to the 1950s, a time when Americans were preoccupied with being the ones to survive an atomic bomb attack from Russia.

We have lived with the Doomsday fear for a long time, but we are still here. We have survived so much that it seems only appropriate to honor our remarkable resilience as we close another year and chronically open another century.

Both the year and the century could be called "The Age of Survivors." This past year we saw a child named Elian survive an ordeal at sea which could have killed his spirit if not his life. Only we put him through another kind of human survival course called "politics" before he was given back to a differently defined surviving parent.

Talking about politics, did we ever think we would see the day when we would have to survive weeks of vote tallying to get a new president?

As a nation, we were mesmerized by the reality TV series appropriately called "Survivors." It shows us what it really takes to survive. It's not always the physical fitness but the use of one's wit and wiles which will get the title of survivor as well as the million-dollar payoff.

On the world scene in the last century, we have survived the worst of man-made weapons and the worst of human nature in world leaders. From Hitler to nuclear warheads aimed at the major cities' backyards, we have allowed the worst in us to march unhampered until it was too late for so many innocent human beings but fortunately not too late to save the whole of humankind.

At the half century mark, the way to survive was to build a bomb shelter, but it will take more this time to survive -- much more. And it hinges on a lot of maybes.

Maybe our will to survive will make us become better stargazers looking for God to save us from ourselves. Maybe we will discover that most of us want the same thing: to survive peacefully if not happily with each other. Maybe we'll try peaceful ways to solve problems and decide to lay down our weapons against our international and national neighbors and not have to worry about weapons of destruction. And then again maybe we'll just have to invent an anti-missile system that puts the destruction out in space for us to breathe a sigh of relief while we watch what could have been The End.

VALERIE WONDRICK

Cape Girardeau