These days I feel as if all of the dystopian nightmares seeded in my teen years are coming true.

I’m not sure when I became politically aware of the world. At maybe three, our preschool was taken out to the nearby highway to wave at the president as his entourage passed by. Was it Johnson or Nixon? Probably Nixon. I remember a car and a helicopter overhead. I thought he was in the helicopter. I think I had some awareness of moon-shots, or at least astronauts, because that was mind-blowing, trying to reconcile “the Man on the Moon” with a man on the moon.

Then, there were the reports on television when I was in first grade. Images of Vietnam, the evacuation of Saigon, the Middle East, all back-to-back, making me think that they were all part of one big conflict. I think one report had mentioned “guerilla” attacks on airplanes, which my childish ears heard as “gorilla” attacks. Gorilla attacks? I looked at the beasts suspiciously at the zoo after that until the adults were watching a t.v. show on which a group of criminals did something criminal wearing gorilla masks. “Oh!” I thought. “That must be what they meant by the gorilla attacks.” Not until I was maybe 11 or 12 and came across the word “guerilla” in a National Geographic article about Napoleon did I realize my mistake.

All of those were flashes, bits that I picked up from the news, or “In the News” segments that ran with commercials in those days. Watergate registered a bit more, then the 1976 election. We were supposed to learn a bit about the Camp David accords in fifth grade, so I remember Sadat and Begin, but more than thinking that Sadat didn’t look like King Tut (also very much in the news at the time) and Begin’s name was spelled the same at the word “begin” slid right through my head.

There are huge chunks of my life in which that was true, as well as huge issues. I think that is probably true of most people: unless something directly affects them, they really don’t pay much attention. It’s all flashes on tv. Like feminists say, the personal is political.

Somewhere in middle school, however, those flashes became longer and brighter. Along the way my feminist consciousness, nascent though it was, grew (another story for another time). I became aware that there was a place called the Soviet Union, they were communist, which was as bad as the Nazis (and, thanks to my father’s fascination with World War II, I was the only first grader who knew about Nazis), and they wanted to take us over or bomb us or start World War III. Something along those lines. The message I seemed to pick up was that the world was on the brink of nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (synonymous with Russia).

Then, the Iranian Hostage Crisis erupted and dominated the news through Reagan’s inauguration. I remember Iranian students being deported and felt badly for them, and the Shah passed through Houston Medical Center for treatment. During this time, we had a very long fire drill at our school on the day of an eclipse. Our teachers weren’t going to let us see the eclipse because it wasn’t total. Now, we were able to see it and, of course, get out of class for a long time. When they finally told us that the extra long fire drill was because of a bomb threat, they mentioned that the school was hypervigilant of the Iranian crisis.

I would think a bomb threat itself would call for hypervigilance, and the Iranian bit seemed so disconnected from the hostage displayed at the American embassy on the daily counts on the news or the crying college students embracing their friends as they were hauled away. What did our middle school in a Houston suburb of predominantly White, some Black, some Hispanic students, and about five Asian students have to do with that? My 11-year-old self had no idea. (I’m guessing a lot of 11-year-olds wonder at the reasons their whole lives are in upheaval right now over more than just a long fire drill.)

The 1980 election took place when I was in 8th grade, and our social studies class covered elections in the first unit of the year. I was pro-Reagan — the first and last time that I was ever Republican — because my parents were Republican, although my mother and I had huge caveats about his anti-choice stance. We were both very pro-choice. I have always been pro-choice ever since I can remember. For me, it was a question of bodily autonomy, as it should be.

By the way, my dad ended up hating Reagan, but continued to vote for him and Republicans all the way until 2016, in spite of his increasing disgust. Then, he wanted Bernie Sanders. I nearly fell out of my chair when he confessed that to me. My mom turned Democrat sometime between Bushes.

To give my little, white, 13-year-old, suburban self some agency, I probably responded to all of the attacks on Jimmy Carter as a weakling, Reagan presenting himself as a tough guy who could protect the country from the Big Bad Soviets and the new Big Bad Iranians, and what I can only identify as my naive libertarianism. Only in college and especially in grad school did I learn about how deeply offensive his platform was to the values that I had realized were mine. I was too young to know and the education system did not teach that Philadelphia, Mississippi, was the site where three Civil Rights activists were murdered.

The Iranian Hostage Crisis ended, or rather, fell out of the news, with the release of the hostages on Reagan’s inauguration. There were a lot of Middle Eastern Big Bads that followed, few of which I could name beyond Ghaddafi, whose name was spelled in about ten different ways depending on the news outlet. My school district became more diversified with immigration, and as we moved up into higher schools, we joined students from different parts of the larger school district. I had classmates from some of these vilified regions of the worlds and, as I joked with Dad, “they did not have horns or tails” as the popular cultural propaganda would have us believe. Dad was always counseling us to separate the government from the people. Totalitarian regimes are not always popular regimes.

Still, over these years, the same elements haunted me: the Soviet Union, nuclear war, and totalitarian government. I had nightmares that the totalitarian government came after a nuclear war during which the Soviet Union took over the U.S. I also created worlds, too, in which the religious right (which was neither) took over. They scared the shit out of me whenever they reared their head. Iran, again, became the Big Bad warning of the ways theocracy could end women’s rights. I was less afraid of Iran imposing their rule on the U.S. than I was about the American Moral Majority (which was neither) and their ilk. The Handmaid’s Tale was terrifying even in the late 1980s when it first came out. Yet, that didn’t seem to be as clear and present a danger as nuclear annihilation (or as it does now).

The movies of the day did not help either, and added into the mix the fears of another Vietnam-type of conflict, one that I think I suspected would likely Middle Eastern than Soviet Union, or perhaps Latin American. I can’t remember precisely where I thought it would happen, but I do remember fearing an on-going, un-winnable, pointless war that would sacrifice thousands of boys my own age like my brothers or my friends or my crushes.

In fact, when Desert Shield began, I worked at an oil industry magazine. All of the editors and salesmen there danced around the office, giddy with excitement. I sat shaking at my desk thinking of my brother, not in college, all the young men who I worked with at my night job, all of the movies about Vietnam, what I had learned about that war. “How could they be so joyful?” I fumed. “People will die. Do they not remember? Did they not learn?”

Perhaps the most ludicrous thing I remember is a — I hesitate to call it — documentary on Nostradamus that came on HBO or some such cable channel when I was in 9th grade. Orson Welles narrated. I looked it up during the 45th administration during one or another close call like now. What schlock! Still, it played right into my 14-year-old anxieties. By the time the madman in the blue turban in the east set off the bombs, I was in tears.

My parents had been out for the evening and came home to find me hysterical. Dad had to explain to me that this Nostradamus stuff was all extremely speculative, open to a million interpretations. Then, Mom convinced me to focus on the music of Paul Simon because One Trick Pony came on right after the Nostradamus show. (I will always think of those songs as soothing.) Gradually, I learned to deal with my anxieties through escape and through dark humor. Dr. Strangelove still makes such perfect sense (we had to get a VCR before I could watch that).

I have since learned that Nostradamus’s “predictions” had to do with the politics surrounding the French court at the time of Maria de Medici and Henry Navarre. All of the interpretations that he predicted modern or future events — future for even us — are laughable. Nevertheless, I still think about them. Not as truth or predictions, just as life imitating art — or schlock. After all, that “documentary” was of its time.

This post had a point, one beyond calming myself. I more than digress. I digress within my digressions, then digress further. This will go in the “does she have ADHD?” folder.

I needed to calm myself with words, with memories for perspective. I am nearly sixty years old. In these years, my old fears are still here. The Soviet Union is not gone anymore than the Russian Empire before it disappeared with the Soviet Union. It just reconfigured with a different czar under a different name. The current name is taking up the expansion, and instead of opposing it, our own czar wants to help. That’s not a satisfactory resolution to the Cold War. Rather, it seems more like my fears of a take over, just under a different guise — a Vichy version of the U.S.

Quagmire wars we saw again, and just as that was resolved in just as messy a way as the one before, here we are again. This one was preventable, but the person who is waging it didn’t want to prevent it. Just like the conflict in Vietnam, Congress will not or cannot use its authority to stop this slide into disaster. Deportations, attacks on women’s rights, the threat of nuclear attack, the potential suspension of Constitutional rights under war powers. This all comes out of every dystopian novel written in the past sixty years, including the ones that I wrote in pencil in spiral notebooks or imagined as I lay awake at night until sleep turned them into nightmares.

I don’t use this space for politics because I have nothing deep or original to say about politics. Mostly, my political thoughts are barbaric yawps that I put on Facebook in real time. This required more space, not so much to express an opinion, but to wonder at the way I have lived through this political history. Sometimes it feels like a kaleidoscope. The same bits and pieces just shuffle and tumble about in new configurations, but they are still the same bits and pieces. Perhaps also, it is like a spring, coiling back on itself, stretching and snapping back, folding itself into knots.

I’m sure I could come up with more metaphors; but it all leads to the realization that no one learns anything from the past. They follow what affects them and have flashes of the news of everything else. Then, they react.

Like at the end of Dr. Strangelove, “we’ll meet again.”