Think About It

          I am a little too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis firsthand, but it changed world history.  For a couple of weeks of October, 1962 the world stood on the brink of an international crisis and the potential of the next world war.  The governments of the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba postured with each other over the presence of weapons in the Western Hemisphere (more specifically, in the Caribbean region, just a few dozen miles off of the coast of the United States).  The history books and personal reflections of the time reinforce just how close we came to hostilities that had the potential to be catastrophic.  As I think back on this time in history I am reminded of a few life-lessons: 1.  Life is tenuous .  The earth’s well-being was jeopardized by this event and it should be a reminder of how fragile life is.  I don’t know the amount of devastation that would have been wreaked on the world, but lives would have been lost.  Let’s not take life (or