I had a great idea for this project. One I’d been saving for the right moment since last year. As it turns out, this was not the right moment.
In this project, I originally had to make a companion piece to go with my video from the Manhattan Project2. It could be anything I wanted. I could make a sculpture, a song, a puppet show, a picture, anything… except a video. If it has moving visuals on a screen, it’s off limits. We would go on to present our videos and companion pieces at a parent night. In my learning intensions blog post for this project, I was thinking about making a hockey broadcast parody. This is actually an idea I have been holding onto since my speech from the “Definitely Not The 51st State” project in grade 10.
The Original Plan:
Unfortunately, as this project progressed, the teachers started to realize that we wouldn’t make the deadline of the parent night, especially with the other assignments we were doing along the way in this project (Which I will explain in the next paragraph). We ended up cancelling the parent night, and pivoting the final piece of this project to be the pitch, instead of the companion piece itself. So, here’s my final pitch:
The Other Assignments We Were Doing Along The Way In This Project:
Here I am, writing this post, already halfway in (I hope), and I’m realizing I haven’t talked about the topic of research for this project. If you looked enough at my pitch, or if you went back to my pre-project post, then these two sentences have been useless for you. If not, this project was about how fear drove the Cold War. One way that we learnt about fear in the Cold War was through a fictional story of a family and their neighbours surviving in a fallout shelter after Soviet forces dropped a bomb on New York City. This story is the book Fallout by Todd Strasser.
While reading Fallout, I made three separate response journals, 1 for each section of the book. Then, at the end, I used them to make a synthesis reflection (aka essay) about one of the themes in the book. I chose to write mine about how scarcity of resources affects everyone’s decision making within the bunker.
In Fallout, Todd Strasser explores how scarcity of resources can cause people to be fearful. That fear can cause people to try to save themselves and protect their families. This combination of fear and scarcity leads people to make difficult moral choices. Sometimes these choices of who should survive are impacted by social inequalities. While this book is set in the 1960s, and it is influenced by Strasser’s childhood fears from growing up in the Cold War, the themes are just as relevant to today’s issues of scarcity like during the Covid pandemic and with natural resources.
Out of fear of a nuclear attack, Mr. Porter built a bomb shelter in his backyard. The shelter was meant to protect his family of four. It was a source of tension with his wife, who thought a nuclear war wouldn’t happen or if it did, everyone would die anyway. She was also worried about the neighbours finding out because she didn’t want them to think they were paranoid since they were sure no bomb would be dropped. When the bomb did drop, those same neighbours all tried to get into the shelter. Out of fear of survival for his family, Mr. Porter tried to prevent them from entering the shelter, even though he wanted to help everyone. “Familiar faces crowd around the square opening above. . . “There’s no room,” dad protests meekly. . . “You’ll kill us all!” Even though he knew it was true, he still felt bad about not letting everyone in.
Inside the shelter, they didn’t have enough supplies to last. They didn’t have enough food or toilet paper. “I only stored enough food for four. Now we’re ten. At this rate, we’ll use it all up by the end of the first week.” People were hungry. They grew weak and demoralized. At times there was tension about when to eat and who should eat. As food supplies grew more scarce, Mr. McGovern began to challenge who had the right to eat saying “We probably don’t have enough to make it until the radiation gets down to a safe level. But with two less mouths to feed, maybe we could.” Mr. McGovern’s racist attitude prioritized his survival over Mrs. Porter and Janet’s. These attitudes arise when times are difficult. In the Cold War, there was fear of communism. During Covid, racism against Chinese people increased.
At the end of the book, Mr. Porter realized that he needed the support of the others to open the bomb shelter to escape. In the end, the characters had to put aside their fears and differences and work together. “Dismantling the bunk takes time. Dad gets tired and has to rest. Mr. Shaw takes over for a while, and then Mrs. Shaw, and even Mr. McGovern. Parts have to be unscrewed, then moved around the shield wall and put back together. With the extra activity, the air gets stale faster, so Dad assigns Ronnie and me to crank the ventilator.”
Fallout shows that fear can divide people and push them toward selfish choices, but it also proves that cooperation is the only way to make it through a crisis. The characters survive not because they act alone, but because they eventually learn to work together, even when they are scared and running out of resources. Today we face new challenges, including the growing scarcity caused by climate change, and the same choice still exists. Fear can pull us apart, or we can face it as a community.
The Other Assignments We Were Doing Along The Way In This Project (Cont.):
Another way we learnt about fear in the Cold War was through research and Socratic Seminars. In these seminars, our class arranged ourselves into an inner and an outer circle, with the same amount of people in each, so everyone has a partner in the other circle. We were given a question, and the inner circle discussed and answered it while the outer circle kept track of their partner’s contributions, and gave them advice or ideas to talk about. I enjoyed listening to what my peers had to say, but I really struggled to get into the conversation. I like having time to prepare my thoughts and ideas, so since I only knew the topic when we started the seminar, I couldn’t prepare very much in advance. During the seminars, I got some ideas from what others were talking about, but by the time I had formulated my ideas, the conversation had already moved on. In total, over all 3 seminars, I only spoke twice.
Hopefully the right moment comes sooner or later to use my hockey broadcast idea, but for now, I’m gonna go learn how to debate!