PERSPECTIVES-- Leave Me Alone in My Comfort Zone: I Like it Here

Screenshot from "Duck and Cover" film, a 1952 movie. The ‘Duck and Cover’ propaganda movie was probably one of the most famous of all the pieces of propaganda during the early stages of the cold war. It was targeted at school children and was intended to install the constant fear of a nuclear attack from the Soviets.

James C. Johnston Jr.

The term, “Comfort Zone”, has become an idiom of the English language during the last few decades. It erupted on the public consciousness like a rising phoenix, and I wanted to know exactly where the term “Comfort Zone” came from. Its connotation has become somewhat negative, and I wondered why. After a simple search, I discovered that management theorist Alasdair White was the author of the phrase. When asked about the meaning of his famous phrase, he defined “Comfort Zone” as, “A psychological state where individuals feel familiar, at ease, in control, and experience low levels of anxiety.”

Now, is that not altogether a beautiful thing? Don’t we want to spend the better part of our lives seeking the sort of ideal peaceful state as defined by Mr. White’s “Comfort Zone” by engaging in such activities as: study, working diligently, and saving money in order to construct an ideal de facto “Comfort Zone” in which to live our lives in peace far from “The Maddening Crowd” and or in a general atmosphere of “High Anxiety”?

After all, I was born in 1944 when the world was facing certain destruction and the greatest unalloyed evil ever conceived by the twisted mind of a man who was presented to the world in the person of a certified demon and the most evil man who most likely ever lived, Adolf Hitler. He was the author of the worse war in the history of the world not to mention “The Holocaust.”

The horrible reality of Hitler was followed by the horrible reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then followed by the horrible reality of the “Cold War” and threat of thermonuclear annihilation. This in turn was reinforced by weekly Atomic Bomb Drills in the Franklin Public Schools. This series of events was more than enough to damage more than a few generations of children wholesale between 1933 and 1963.

I know that when I was a little kid, faced with all of these various prospects of death and general destruction, that I wanted a perfect “comfort zone”. Not long after the fall of Hitler, the second most horrible demon who ever lived in the modern age came to dominate the world stage as the personification of all that was the most likely author of Hell on earth, Joseph Stalin. As de
facto Czar of all that was Evil, and The Soviet Party Secretary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he set about absorbing all of Eastern Europe and a significant part of Central Europe bringing this whole geographic area into his unholy sphere of influence. Party General Secretary Stalin promised to bury the West and bring the whole world under the domination of the Communist System. Stalin also abetted Mao Tse Tung, the Communist leader of “Red China” in the days before the preferred Western spelling of his name was to become Mao Zedong, in becoming leader of the largest single political unit on earth. In 1949, Mao, became master of the huge Chinese Nation and the third of a trifecta of giant bed-men to dominate my nightmares in a world filled with justifiable paranoia on an industrial level.

Later North Korea and dozens of other Communist entities emerged as sovereign, semi-sovereign, or puppet states in the Soviet sphere of influence which were dedicated to and allied with the international forces of anti-democratic oppression. With The Soviets getting the Atomic Bomb and having the will to use it in 1949, the whole world trembled at the very real prospect of mutually assured destruction of what was left of world civilization as we then knew it. And the “Cold War” began.

This was truly a new age of anxiety embracing the whole world, and as children, we were reminded of it every day in school when we practiced for the terminal eventuality of our own demise in the horrible blooming blast of a cosmic mushroom cloud of death in the form of this all destructive bomb which was going to be dropped on us by the Russians. The idea itself was not always articulated, but the palpable threat was very real and always there just under the surface of things.

Years later I can remember college kids protesting that they wanted to be issued suicide pills, most likely potassium of cyanide, in case of a thermonuclear attack in the United States so that would not have to suffer as had Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

My neighbors who lived next door to me in Unionville belonged to The Franklin Skyway Patrol. They followed a regular schedule when they took a turn in the tower of the Franklin Fire Station scanning the sky with binoculars looking for Soviet Bombers heading to Franklin with their load of Atomic Bombs at the ready to drop on us. Once in a while Soviet Migs were actually reported. Now, was that real or what! That was my world in the 1950’s, and it was a scary place to live in.

I might point out that these fears were legitimized and reinforced at Mass on Sunday at St. Mary’s Church where Stalin was mentioned in sermons as the ultimate force of evil in the world. I remember the priest loudly condemning Stalin as the proud sinner who would ultimately fall before the vengeance of a jealous God. That was in 1953, and a very short time later, Stalin was reported as being dead. What power did this priest have I wondered?

Who would not wish for a comfort zone in 1953 especially if you were a nine-years-old and the Atomic Bomb drills, accompanied by their screaming siren sounds, had moved you out of the classroom and into the central halls along interior walls as a “crouching-space-of-safety, in order to avoid flying debris altogether when the bomb went off. To this day, I wonder what genius thought that one up?

Eventually, after growing up in a world of advanced paranoia, I did make a very nice world for myself in my ancestral antique house filled with things that I liked to look at and share with my chosen community of friends. In my “comfort zone”, I can do as I wish, when I wish, in the company of my chosen friends, or I am free to enjoy my solitude with my music, books, and to think what ideas that I wish to think, write what I wish, enjoy television-viewing [mindless and otherwise], also telephone conversations, emailing, or just enjoy relaxing in the luxury of sublime, quiet, and generally enjoying the equally sublime pleasure of being absolutely alone with my thoughts.

Spelled out like this doesn’t a “comfort zone” sound deliciously subversive? I love the “Comfort Zone” which I have made for myself. It has contrasted with a much nicer reality with that “Other Reality” we were forced to live with over the years of my coming of age in the 1950’s when “Ducking-and-Covering” under our school desks in anticipation of the landing of “THE BOMB” was the very dominate gruesome reality. How many people suffered from generalized feelings of loss-of-innocence, grief, and undefined abstract fears and never fully realized why.

Here in my “zone of sublime comfort” I have, over the years, become a fully self-actualized member of the Human Race, and I am frequently wonderfully happy and generally satisfied with life. There is no reason for any rational person of my years, or any age when it comes to that, to allow them to be dragged from this wonderful “place of comfort” against their will to be forced to endure some activity that some other person thinks that you ought to be exposed to. If we choose not to be “discomforted”, that is our choice in a free society.
 Brown
vs. the School; Board of Topeka Kansas decision
of the United States Supreme Court in 1953. This was the first time
since the Plessey
vs. Ferguson decision
in 1896 that racism was even addressed by the Supreme Court since the
heyday of the Abolitionist Movement and Civil War.

By the time we all have a achieved a certain stage of psychosexual development, as the Freudian School of Psychology would put it, there are not too many experiences we cannot, indeed, vicariously or otherwise have experienced by contemplation, reading a book, or watching a film. And most of the time, life-experience has taught us weather or not we might enjoy such experiences in real life based on such concepts as: is it fun, generally pleasurable, constitutes ethical behavior, conforms to your ethical standards of comfortable behaviors in general, or your real physical abilities, or would you just rather not try bungee-jumping after all! Really!

Leave me alone in my “comfort zone”. I have worked hard to get to the point where I have constructed a very nice “comfort zone” for my own selfish benefit which conforms to my select group of pleasures. In a democracy, do I not have the right to be selfish? These anti-comfort zealots, who think that everybody should face their fears and demons, would rip us from our wonderful “zones of comfort” “For our own good.” Should these disturbers of the peace not just mind their own damned business and leave us to our lovely delusions?

I have always liked my “pet-fears” and “demons” just the way they are. I started collecting my “pet-demons” back in the 1940’s and 1950’s just like most kids did in the deep recesses of over-active juvenile imagination. I let these fantastic monsters dwell under my bed and in my closets. On the whole, they were a lot nicer, and far more rational, than Hitler and Stalin, and I had negotiated real treaties and agreements with them. Such articles were negotiated that if I kept to my side of the sheets, and not invade any area beyond my allotted space, either under the bed or in the closet at night, all would be well, and we, that is the monsters and me, could count on each other to keep the conditions of our peace-treaty arrangements. When you think of it, this was very rational thinking for the “Cold War Period” by a person aged five to nine!

Now remember, I grew up in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, and there were real monsters to really fear! Remember well that “Uncle Joe Stalin” was coming to get us, and he was a real-live-monster. He had bombs, and he was coming to Franklin to drop them on us. We knew that this was true, because our teachers told us so when the warning sirens sounded and we crouched under the desks in mortal fear until we were told that the danger was past and we could rise and go back to our study of the doings of: Dick, Jane, Sally, and Puff-the–Cat, and Spot-the-Dog in our reading lesson.

After Stalin passed from the mortal scene, a little bald fat guy emerged as the ultimate Soviet Leader of The Union if Soviet Socialist Republics, after some other bad guys who proved to be less capable tyrants came and went, and this new Party Secretary of the Russian Communist Party had the most improbable name of Nikita Khrushchev.

Somehow he seemed a little less threatening than Comrade Stalin, and he also had a jolly fat little wife, who appeared never to have had a thought in her whole life beyond: feeding live-stock, cooking, cleaning, and mending socks, and she also looked like somebody’s grandmother on a windy washing day all dressed up on her work clothes to hang out the self-same wash in a sixty-mile-an-hour gale. She and Nikita were not as scary looking at all as Stalin in his uniform as a Marshall of the Soviet State had been. Nikita was kind of funny with his toothy peasant grin when he went to the United Nations and showed his contempt for what was being said by taking off his shoe and banging the desk in a fit of temper. Now wasn’t he just a jolly old peasant! The fact of his killing thousands of people in Stalin’s purges didn’t seem to enter my thought process at all at the time I must confess.

When Nikita Khrushchev almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the fall season of 1962, when the Soviets put ballistic missiles in Cuba, he didn’t look so “Jolly”, but then we had a genuine hero for a president then who had performed real acts of physical courage and consummate bravery in World War II and who had the right strength of character to face the Soviets down, President John F. Kennedy. His powerful personality prevailed in ordering our fleet to turn the Soviet ships bound for Cuba with the Soviet Missiles aboard to turn around and sail back to the U. S. S. R., and Khrushchev was forced to remove those weapons of mass destruction which had already been positioned in Cuba from our hemisphere.

During those says in October of 1962, I personally observed the men in my dormitory praying on their knees, en-mass, in the commons-room for deliverance from thermonuclear war. I went that evening walking around the college town on that chilly Sunday Fall October evening for a look at the phenomenon of mass-fear gripping the wider community. I knew that I was looking at history. My perspective never was quite like everybody else’s. I wanted to know how fear of utter destruction looked in October of 1962, and here was my chance. Now, sixty-three years later, I am sharing this with you most of whom were not even alive then.

The churches of my college town were crowded to the doors with worshippers praying for peace. I was an historian, and I was an observer charged by my mission as a historian to walk all over the little New England college community watching the reaction of the people of 1962 to this huge and frightening challenge to world peace.

These people were frightened very badly frightened. The “Cold War” looked as if it could get very hot very quickly. I would have loved a “Zone of Comfort” to crawl into at that moment, yet I was oddly captivated by the historical significance of what I was seeing right in front of me. All the fears inculcated into me over the entirety of my very short lifetime of eighteen years, by a very paranoid society, of a thermonuclear Gotterdammerung was coming to total fruition before my eyes. This was history in the making and disturbingly fascinating to me

Has I have mentioned, in school in those days all of our fears of the Russians were reaffirmed and reinforced every time a siren went off periodically. Yes, hundreds of times we instantly dove under our desks or ran out into the interior halls with our hands clasped over the backs of our necks so that the flying debris from the exploded bomb would not be as likely to sever our jugulars or decapitate us as the atomic blast shot lethal shards of loose material into the rooms and the spaces that we sheltered in. I often wondered what our shielding hands would have looked like after being shredded by the razor-sharp glass which was capable of cutting your head off after the fiery holocaust resulting from the thermonuclear explosion that we knew for certain would come someday for us. Was now that time?

From 1949 until the early 1960’s we all knew that life during the “Cold War” was a very temporary affair. By the 1960’s I also suppose it was natural to become just a tad hedonistic under the circumstances, and America was, after all, a very materialistic place. Like most of my contemporaries, I was at least inclined to good and healthy “crass materialism” as a true son of America. In the 1960’s, we went a bit wild with a sort of abandonment, and why not? To add to everything else, we now had this war in Viet Nam, and again death was a nasty reality which was very close to us especially if you were not in college, and watching the “Weekly Body Count” on T.V., but that is another story altogether.

In the 1950’s “Cold War Era” we were not really very nice to each other on the domestic level. The ideal thing to be in those days sociologically was a white Anglo-Saxon Christian. Being that in “Lllly-White America” was just the ideal thing to be to fit-in in a true “Leave-It-to-Beaver-Sort –of Way.” That “WASP” thing was the truly “Beau-Ideal” thing to be all right according to sociological authorities like Cleveland Amory who really understood the America of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

In reality we had an American cast system in mid-century America which was largely unofficial. This was true at least outside of the South where the cast system was enforced by law if not by strong social convention. If you were a Black child of fourteen, like Emmet Till visiting your Southern cousins from far-away Chicago, you better not “Wolf-Whistle” at a white woman or you might end-up very tortured and very dead before you ever saw your fifteenth birthday! Big tough older white men, “Real Heroic Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”, liked to kill young Black Kids who had no real idea of what they were doing back almost seventy years ago in the Good Old Post-Confederate South in regards to local custom if they were out-of-area visitors to Deep-Dixi.

We were brought up to “Respect” the rights and cultural differences of people who were not like us. This was supposed to be true, at least in theory, in the North more so than in the South. But underneath it all, we were not nearly as nice as we should have been to our fellow citizens, who were not White Anglo-Saxon Americans. In regards to respecting individual differences, I myself saw a huge positive growth in the area of racial relations beginning with the seminalAnd Plessey
was hardly a
huge victory for Civil Rights. In Plessy
vs. Ferguson,the best language that the Court could muster was a stupid sort of parity in the wording of the decision, “Separate but equal…” in relationship to the nation’s Black and White schools. Realistically “Separate” can never truly be “Equal”, and we all know that.

The Civil Rights Movement was very much a “comfortable zone” personally for me to inhabit and embrace from the nid-1950’s down to this very day. My mother had educated us from infancy that human equality was absolute. I was very surprised to learn that this view was not always shared by my classmates in good old Franklin, Mass., and at times, this fact became a cause of friction between some of us. This was also true of the very few instances when migrant laborers came to town around 1952, and the decades before that, to help with harvesting on the few big local farms that were still in operation seventy-some years ago.

The few poor children who came to Franklin with their folks to help taking-in the crops, mostly Mid-Westerners, and Southerners who could barely read and write, also came into our school for a few weeks, because they were under the age of sixteen and required to under the provisions of The Keating-Owens
Child Labor Law of 1916, to attend school. Massachusetts was very serious about enforcing the law’s provisions, and these poor kids were frequently dirty and under-fed. I tried to be friendly with them, but they were scared and mis-trusting of us Northern folk. As it turned-out, not without reason.

I had a beast of a second grade teacher at The Ray School who made this one tiny migrant-labor-kid, in dirty bib overalls, an obviously dirty shirt, with a dilapidated straw hat, and wearing no socks, sit up in front of the class and facing the class, because poor little kid could neither read nor write. This horrible woman, who taught second grade at the school, shamed him with smugly cold malice. So, I took my chair and put it next to his and sat beside him thus also becoming an object of derision. I was frustrated, because that was all I could ho at age seven to protest this injustice. I too became degraded in the eyes of my classmates, but I didn’t have much respect for the bourgeois opinions of these shallow kids in my class that day anyway, and well they knew it.

After that horrible day, I never saw that poor kid again. I hate to think of the hate he grew-up with as a result of that awful treatment. Things were pretty bad back then. The myth of the “Good Old Days” is just that-a myth, but things were on the path of reform.

In 1953, we had a Great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the person of the former Republican Governor of California, Earl Warren, who led the Court for eighteen years in a very enlightened manner. We had a great President in Republican and World War II leader Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower who enforced desegregation in the South during the first days of integration by sending the 101st Airborne Division and nationalizing the National Guard to protect students of color going to schools with white kids for the first time. Warren and Eisenhower were my heroes. I was addicted to the national news as reported by John Cameron Swayze in those distant days when our 1952 Admiral 21-inch T.V. was the envy of the neighborhood. Freedom is never free, and even in these days, we had all better beware of the real dangers now posed to our rights and privileges as members of the Human Race in the democracy known as the United States of America.

The point I am making is that we have all come of age in a place and at a time where real danger of total extermination was and is not unthinkable. We live in a time when we could see all of our civil rights, and human rights, and freedom just disappear before our eyes motivated by irrational fear of “The Other”. The great disparity in the possession and holding of wealth has never been greater, and greed seems to be justified at the expense of ethical behavior at every turn. Do we sometimes need a “Personal Zone of Comfort”? Oh yes we do. I might invite you into my “comfort zone” and share it with you for a while, but do not make an effort to pull me out of it any time soon. I will not go without a fight. Mr. Alasdair White defined just what a “Comfort Zone “ is, and it is a place in which I intend to spend a lot of good quality time away from as much reality as I can. And for this, I make no apology.