Columnist Susan Snyder: Terror the marker for today’s kids

Friday, Oct. 5, 2001 | 4:40 a.m.

MRS. STEVENSON'S first grade class at Westview Elementary School started the same way every morning.

We recited "The Pledge of Allegiance." We sang "You're a Grand Old Flag," or something similarly patriotic. Then we settled into the academic life of the average 6-year-old until recess.

Fridays were a little different. At 11 a.m. the town's air raid siren sounded, and we crouched under our desks until it quit. When it was over we popped up and went outside, where our mothers waited to take us home for lunch.

We didn't have a school lunch program and didn't know what a fraction was. But we knew what to do in case of a nuclear attack.

Every generation has its marker -- an event or a collection of events that forever changes the way people look at themselves and the rest of the world.

For Generation X'ers it may be the Challenger space shuttle explosion.

Younger Baby Boomers will recall the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Older Boomers know where they were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and where they first heard that his brother Sen. Robert Kennedy suffered the same fate.

My mother was sitting in the bathtub when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Her dad heard it on the radio downstairs. They lived in Detroit. She was 16. All of her male classmates and boyfriends went to war. Many never came back.

Last week television footage of President Bush visiting a New York City first grade class showed pictures the children had drawn of what they saw the morning of Sept. 11. Their school sits a few blocks from where the World Trade Center used to be.

There's something unnerving about images of war rendered in Crayola.

But that is their marker. Their city, their country, their world, even their vocabulary will never be the same.

Terrorism, the Taliban, Kabul.

Napalm, Viet Cong, Cambodia.

Air raid sirens, fallout shelters, the Iron Curtain.

Blackouts, victory gardens, Auschwitz.

Words of war and international conflict imprint themselves on the minds of every generation. We learn to live with and work around that which scares us to death.

In fifth grade I read "Fail Safe." It described the events leading up to an accidental U.S. nuclear attack on Moscow. At the end the president decides the only viable solution is to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City.

He gives the order with no warning. The bomb falls.

Jeepers, I wondered, could they really do that? Is that why we scuttled under our desks every Friday morning in Mrs. Stevenson's room?

It was terrifying. Grown-ups had secret plans and secret codes that determined whether my future would happen. No one would even ask. We wouldn't have time to decide anything. We would all just be gone. What would happen to my mom and dad? My brother and my cat? Where would we be when it happened?

It kept me awake at night. I thought about it at school. I asked my mother why nobody seemed worried but me. I asked her why she wasn't afraid.

"There's nothing we can do about it," she said. "There's no sense in worrying when there's nothing you can do about it."

As it turns out, I grew up fearing a war that never happened.

This generation of first graders won't be able to say the same.

It happened, and it happened right here. They didn't get sirens. Hiding under their desks wouldn't have helped. They will never forget it.

My first television memory is of Bobby Kennedy being shot. For many children, that first TV image will be the World Trade Center towers exploding.

For them, every evening newscast will carry words and images of war. Every day will carry its threat. They'll hear about anthrax. They may even have gas mask drills.

To them I say, hang in there. One day it will be different.

I was in Mr. Irwin's seventh grade class when the Vietnam War ended. I was 12 years old and had never known what it meant to live in a country that was not at war.

But I got the chance to learn.

They will too.