American’s are not commodities. We are real people with needs, wants, and desires. We want what everyone keeps promising. A job would be nice. Medical insurance would be nice. The news is full of talk about American’s not spending money. If I had money, I would spend it. My husband has a part-time job and doesn’t make a lot of money. Unfortunately, we spent every penny of my retirement on the adoption of our grandson and living expenses for the last four years of unemployment. I like to tell people I am retired but honestly, there are just no jobs in our area.

There are major fallacies in the rhetoric that is spewed out in the news and from our elected officials.  American’s would work if there were jobs. Many of the jobs in our area go to non-Americans because they speak the new unofficial language in California. Those who are fluent in English but don’t speak Spanish are not considered for many positions. Do you know how irritating it is to call a business or a professional service to be greeted in Spanish? One of the hardest things to find is a doctor in our area whose first language is English. It is difficult to deal with the language barrier.

I’m not sure what I will do here but thinking that I will start with Helium.  It is a great place to write where I have found interesting people to play with and provides a small income that comes in handy.  Then I discovered Wikinut. It is another fun place to write. We will see about the income there. They report in pounds and I have yet to figure out if I am making money.  I only know US dollars.

To understand why PLANET OF THE APES was so frightening to many of the Baby Boomers, you need to understand a little of the past.

In August of 1949, Russia announced the detonation of their first atomic bomb. Our country prepared for nuclear war. The Civil Defense created and conducted regular air-raid drills. Air-raid sirens were everywhere then. In our California neighborhood, there was no place to go where you could not hear them. The siren was a one minute alert blast, followed by a warbling sound that meant take cover. The sirens were tested every Friday.

I started school in 1954. We were taught to dive under our desks and clasp our arms over our heads the moment we saw the flash of an atomic blast. (This is funny now, as if crouching would save us from being vaporized) Fear had become a daily part of the American life.

The Cuban Missile Crisis started on October 8, 1962 and ended on October 28, 1962. The sirens went off at school. It was recess. All of us stopped what we were doing and started looking for an atomic flash. Everyone was crying because we didn’t want to die. I was in the 8th grade and remember going to the store with my mother. The store was crowded with other mothers, all well dressed in dresses and heels, fighting over food and water.

This is my background for the PLANET OF THE APES.

I went to see the movie at its opening in Los Angeles in 1968. There were a group of us. We all thought we were going to see an adventure movie. No one expected a message movie.

The movie was full of parallels for the time. The first thing that was evident was the play on the class differences and the racism.  Apes were superior to man.  This was appropriate because it was the time of civil rights.  The gorillas were the military, police and human hunters. The orangutans were politicians, lawyers and administrators. The chimpanzees were considered the intellectuals and scientists. Humans were to be hunted and used as scientific experiments. The class system was not any different that what we saw in our daily lives.  

The rest of the movie was entertaining and we began to sympathize with the chimpanzees that were seemingly mistreated. The whole thing of the forbidden zone was skillfully woven into the movie. The spikes on the crown of the Statue of Liberty were the first thing we saw. We didn’t expect it so there was a gasp from the crowd. As Taylor said, we finally did it, we finally blew ourselves up. The whole thought of a post apocalyptic world was a total shock. No one in the theater moved or spoke. I don’t know how long it was but for those of us who were so used to being afraid, this was the nightmare that we had always expected.

Some good things came from this whole episode in our lives.

You can’t scare me with terrorists. You will not see me putting plastic and tape on the windows and doors in fear of a dirty bomb. I simply refuse to live in fear. In those days, we expected communists under every rock and it’s no different today. Today, there is a terrorist behind every tree. That’s just stupid. We are controlled by our fears.

The Interstate System was established in 1956. President Eisenhower’s support was based mostly on economic development, highway safety and traffic relief. However, he did not discount the military value of the Interstates and its use in evacuations (atomic bombs). This still works today for evacuations in the face of hurricanes.  

The term “sex” was the actual event. Anything leading up to that was heavy petting. It was frowned upon by our parents and our churches but since we were not having sex we were unconcerned.

Clinton said he didn’t have sex with that woman. Cut the man some slack. By our definition, he didn’t.