Features Column

Mom keeps fears in check

Life with children

By audrey van buskirk

The Portland Tribune, Apr 22, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Starring Jane Alexander and a young Lukas Haas, 1983’s “Testament” sure could scare a kid growing up in the Cold War era.

COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT WIDESCREEN COLLECTION

Here are the subjects of some of the e-mails I’ve gotten over the past few weeks:

Children exposed to lead!!

Low Carbon Diet and Earth Day

A lifetime of healthy eating begins with baby pajama’s (sic)

Organicgreenmommy.com is born

It’s Earth Day today, if you haven’t guessed, and I’m not exactly sure how to celebrate.

Is it even something to celebrate? It seems that rather than a day of “Isn’t the Earth cool?” and “Hey, we’re still here,” Earth Day is more of a day to bemoan all the various threats facing Mother Earth: global warming, shrinking food supply, diminishing rain forests. Or a day to use as a promotional tie-in for some vaguely Earth-friendly product or another.

While I try to pay attention to our family’s carbon footprint (and by that I mean basic things: We recycle, buy as locally as possible, try to remember to bring our own bags to the store, ride bikes when we can), I’m mindful of not creating a culture of fear around these issues.

Does anyone else remember the movie “Testament”? I must have been about 15 when I watched it, sitting on my parents’ couch one summer afternoon. I have no idea why I would have rented a nuclear holocaust movie – maybe I thought it would be like “Red Dawn,” which I found embarrassingly thrilling – but I can vividly recall the experience.

Starring the incredible Jane Alexander, the movie tells the tale of a family in a small town in Northern California. There’s some sort of nuclear explosion – it’s never exactly clear what’s happened – and despite the overtly normal scene, radiation poisoning begins to sicken and kill the town’s youngest and oldest members.

Alexander’s kindergarten-age son is one of the first to die. That was horrible, but the scene that forever stuck with me was a tear-jerker between Alexander and her preteen daughter in which the dying girl wants her mom to explain intimate adult love, since she won’t get to experience it. I dissolved into those wracking sobs for which teenage girls are so famous.

I have no idea if the movie was any good by critical standards, but it devastated me. I couldn’t understand how grown-ups, politicians – Ronald Reagan, in particular – could know that such awful things could happen and still compete in the arms race.

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