How to Find Home Security When the Blue Meanies Come

“Are you bluish? You don’t look bluish,” the Blue Meanie asks the Beatles with suspicion.

My 3-year-old son, Owen, is in love with the “Yellow Submarine.” He has been asking to watch it every day for at least three weeks. He is trying to learn all the words to each one of the songs. He acts out parts of the story in our living room.

The movie seemed silly and quaintly ‘60s the first time I watched it with Owen. The cartoons are flat, psychedelically colored, and the shapes are organic and rounded. Rainbows, flowers and bell-bottom pants recall life back then.

As we watched the movie post-Sept. 11, I started to think about the movie in relation to the Vietnam War and the peace movement.

The Blue Meanies are warmongers. They create weapons that freeze people and turn them into gray statues. When confronted with the Beatles singing “All You Need Is Love,” the statues unfreeze and join in the song, causing the Meanies to run away in terror. The last of the Blue Meanies bursts into tears when a spell is cast on him that makes his whole body start to sprout flowers. He confesses that his cousin is actually the Bluebird of Happiness and accepts the Beatles’ invitation to join them in saying “yes” to life.

It is the blatant optimism in the face of wartime horror that resonates. People were dying in Vietnam, our government was doing terrible things, yet many people passionately believed that they could come together nonviolently and force it to stop. They believed they could create peace.

I don’t know if they did or not. Maybe we pulled out of Vietnam sooner than we would have otherwise. Our government still does terrible things in small, poor countries. It is just better at keeping it secret, more likely to use native soldiers, preferring covert special forces to conventional deployment. They leave us to our buying and selling, our TV-watching, our sports, our SUVs, our sons safe in colleges and not in the Army.

Recently, I heard a White House spokesperson saying that our government has learned from the Russian misfortunes in Afghanistan; I hope it has also learned from our own past mistakes.

Since the terrorist attacks, I have been exhausted from processing so much painful information. I’m also pregnant. I keep trying to do other things, to live my life, but I am constantly drawn to the news on the radio. This week, I repainted my bedroom. I put up new curtains and bedding. I scrubbed every inch of the floor and cleared the night stands of old magazines and books we weren’t ever going to read.

“You are nesting so early! This baby isn’t due for months still,” my mother says. I shrug, it’s not about the baby. This nesting is about my home, my version of the world, my family’s safety. My friend Debra scrubbed her kitchen floor twice on Sept. 12. My friend Louise alphabetized her three bookshelves. All the women I know are trying to create order and harmony, if only in one small corner.

I don’t know how the government expects to stop what terrifies us all. I don’t believe that bombing Afghanistan will help. But neither do I believe that we can all march together demanding peace and expect to change the world. Today’s world seems too complicated and scary and full of dark secrets.

Our little house here in L.A. has a green and growing backyard, a beautiful lavender bedroom, lots of food stored up in the cupboards, rain boots and sweaters ready for when the weather turns colder, and the Beatles singing every day about love. We all live in the yellow submarine and I’m not leaving to go anywhere else anytime soon.