He did have some "roots" to lose — he tried, and failed, to convince his parents to leave Hungary, for example. But I agree that he appears to have had one foot out the door. Supposedly he stayed that way his whole life, always with suitcases packed. I think it is an interesting mindset. Living life in that way can't be great, psychologi…
He did have some "roots" to lose — he tried, and failed, to convince his parents to leave Hungary, for example. But I agree that he appears to have had one foot out the door. Supposedly he stayed that way his whole life, always with suitcases packed. I think it is an interesting mindset. Living life in that way can't be great, psychologically, and must get in the way of relationships of all sorts. Heck, you couldn't even invest in a dog if that's how you approached life.
And, yeah, this is one of the (several) reasons I am interested in Civil Defense as a topic — this question about the value of preparation and "thinking the unthinkable." Not because I think that it would work the way the planners assumed it would (many of the plans were, in their own way, deeply ignorant or dishonest about the actual conditions that would occur, full of ludicrous assumptions, usually about how society would behave), but because it does help us think about the potential realities of something like nuclear war, and they are quite different from the popular imaginations of them.
He did have some "roots" to lose — he tried, and failed, to convince his parents to leave Hungary, for example. But I agree that he appears to have had one foot out the door. Supposedly he stayed that way his whole life, always with suitcases packed. I think it is an interesting mindset. Living life in that way can't be great, psychologically, and must get in the way of relationships of all sorts. Heck, you couldn't even invest in a dog if that's how you approached life.
And, yeah, this is one of the (several) reasons I am interested in Civil Defense as a topic — this question about the value of preparation and "thinking the unthinkable." Not because I think that it would work the way the planners assumed it would (many of the plans were, in their own way, deeply ignorant or dishonest about the actual conditions that would occur, full of ludicrous assumptions, usually about how society would behave), but because it does help us think about the potential realities of something like nuclear war, and they are quite different from the popular imaginations of them.