So much anger and hatred going around this election season. The doomsayers offer it as unprecedented evidence that America is falling apart into opposing camps. But those of us who entered manhood in the 70's can speak to a greater division then, and somehow we came out stronger.

That great struggle between the left and the right, communism and capitalism, anti-Vietnam War and patriotism -- it all came to a head for me in the struggle between pacifism and the military-industrial complex, with me throwing in with the latter.

All those conflicted years of discussing right and wrong with my hippie friends came to a retroactive discernment along an Arizona highway with a sign for the Titan Missile Museum. Not on many tourist junkets, I was nonetheless intrigued by the idea of laying hands on an intercontinental ballistic missile, the apex product of the military-industrial complex.

The sobering tour through the deactivated missile silo and its command center took an hour, but I found myself wandering the grounds much longer. The equations I had written as an engineer had consolidated into monstrous cold steel, a monument to so much death averted.

If ever I prayed my thanks to God, it was that he saw fit to pass this dreadful cup. I wondered what I would be seeing rambling around America had that button been pressed, nothing of course since I probably would have joined the millions with lives cut short.

The moral dilemma sallied back and forth in my head, such great evil accomplishing such great good, the cancellation of World War III.

Have us oldsters forgotten the grammar school drills of hiding under our desks because that would save us? Looking over at my comrade in arms, she had held her coloring book over her pigtails for extra protection. Curled in frightened little balls, we sometimes snuck a peek at the windows to see if the sky was aflame.

So close to the reality of it all in that silo, that the eve of destruction had been so near, the only illogical piece was that a policy aptly named MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) had actually benefited the human race.

As horrible as 9-11 was, we seem to have forgotten how close we were to losing every building in Manhattan -- and so much more. We have no national holiday, not even an annual moment of silence, to celebrate this triumph of compassion.