November 6, 2024: The Day After
How the 1983 nuclear war movie, The Day After can prepare us for Trump and 2024.
In November of 1983, I was a nervous 14-year-old. Like many teens of that era, I thought a lot about nuclear war. Looking back at the fall of ’83, it was a rather tense time. Two months earlier, the Soviets had shot down Korean Airlines 007 as it made its way to Seoul.
That November, there was talk a lot of chatter about an upcoming movie, The Day After. For those who weren’t born yet, this television movie aired on November 20 and it depicted a full-scale nuclear attack on the United States from the view of Lawrence, Kansas, a college town 40 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri. I didn’t watch the movie. I couldn’t. A week or so earlier, I happened to watch a segment about the movie on 60 Minutes where you saw a five to seven-minute teaser. There is pandemonium in the streets as the civil defense sirens wail. A middle-aged doctor played by Jason Robards sits in his car in traffic presumably as people try to get out of town and the sky turns red as we look ahead down the freeway to see a mushroom cloud form over Kansas City.
That was all it took for me. I had a number of sleepless nights scared witless that this could happen. In some way, the movie did its job: the goal was to make the movie as realistic…
