Jason Selby

Within three generations, my male ancestors and a sibling experienced three of the most pivotal events of the 20th century in utero. My grandfather was gestating in his mother’s womb during the Great Flu, and he was born in December 1918. My father was in utero when they dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. My brother was conceived approximately when man took his first step on the moon in July 1969.

In the 1982 nonfiction book “Indefensible Weapons,” Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk speak of the double lives we experience as humans. Though they write of the Cold War through the lens of modern psychology, the facts apply outside the atomic bomb. The idea of mortality consumes us both on the individual plane -- ‘I will die’ -- and on the grander scale of the

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