"Duck and cover" became "I do"

This is a paragraph lifted verbatim (at least I owned up to it... hope she won't sue me) from an Ellen Goodman column. I use it for my own purposes, completely different from hers.
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"Are we safer? At the end of her convention speech Laura Bush talked about a time when schoolchildren were told to "duck and cover" under their desks in case of nuclear war. She said, "We need to explain that because of strong American leadership in the past we don't hide under our desks anymore."
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Oh, I remember those "duck and cover" school days. And my wife remembers being trained to line up in the hallways, face against the wall, a long line of little boys and girls about to become ashes. "Strong American leadership" of that day duped us into thinking, or pretending, the world was a much less dangerous place than it really was (is).

You know...just put your right foot in, shake it all about, and say "Duck and cover! Duck and cover!" and those nasty bombs won't put a silhouette of you on the wall.

A few years later a poster advised the following course of action should Nuclear War come a-callin':
1. Bend over.
2. Put your head between your legs.
3. Kiss your ass goodbye.

I really liked that poster. Now that I think of it, it's probably why I got married when I did.

"Huh?", you say.

When you believe the world could go poof (well, louder) any minute you really want to make the most of what you've got. And the best of what I had was in a different school 650 miles away.

We had listened to our government's lies about Vietnam daily. We saw the soldiers who didn't come home in boxes reviled instead of welcomed when they finally did get back. Yes, we were against the war, but not against the ones who went. We were against the ones that sent them.

We saw Nixon unmasked and Agnew defrocked. We saw John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. King assassinated. We watched the Chicago Democratic Convention of '68; the illegal invasion of Cambodia and then four students shot by the National Guard at Kent State during a nonviolent protest; Watts and other cities in flames in protest of racial injustice; and before all that there was the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet Premier Kruschev banging a U.N. table with his shoe, practically frothing at the mouth while he yelled "We will bury you".

He was talking to us.

A few years earlier, the government had told us to do stupid things like "duck and cover", knowing that was useless. And back then, just how did John Q. Public put Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and "crawl under a school desk" into the mental blender and fail to come up with "kiss your ass goodbye"?

I can imagine people in high places putting together an information campaign to keep the populace from sinking into mob hysterics...or political awareness. I'm sure they thought it better to prescribe this painkiller pablum.

The poster exemplified a more realistic approach to the world's dangers.

Anyway, despite being students at the time, being pretty broke and our plan not exactly finding favor in the parental world, my sweetheart and I decided we wanted to be together all the time, for as long as that might be, and before it was too late.

So, for 31 years minus working hours, we've spent just about every minute of our lives together.

If somebody drops another Fat Boy and the world does go poof (louder) we'll just hug and say "Glad we got married when we did!"