These are things that happen like many other things that happen throughout the world that I choose not to concern myself with anymore. The list seems endless. Yet, apathy is a pretty strong word to use to describe myself. How then, knowing that my life is about activism, could I live with my apathy?

The world I was born into was in the grip of forces that were beyond my reach. At ten years old, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. Daily, for weeks on end, we'd "duck and cover," practicing how to protect ourselves (!) in the event of nuclear attack. Once a week we'd have what I'd call "Hellfire Drills" where we'd be directed to silently file down into our concrete bunker-like basement and await an all-clear signal, which, depending upon the sadism factor of the nuns that day, would come quickly or excruciatingly slowly.

Every day for years, the noon air-raid sirens wailed and the radio regularly blared out an ominous tone, followed, at its cessation, by the message, "The foregoing was a test!” I’d have waves of apprehension commencing when I’d hear a plane overhead. The knowledge, drilled in to my bones, was that death would come from above. It doesn’t matter that with each report of danger there was an associated report of how our “resolve” would save the day, death was on its way. Period.

I fully expected the tension between Russia and my own country to explode in everyone’s face, much as I had been witness to countless explosions between my own parents. By the time I was six I figured out that adults, as a whole, were out of their minds and did not have the love in them to avoid destroying everything in my world, from top to bottom.