I love my parents, but they were into all this earth changes, Gordan Michael something. There was a map on the kitchen wall with a broken apart USA. I was a kid and it freaked me out. I was pretty skeptical but it was still very frightening. Then I had a teacher tell us that all the bible prophesies ended on 2000, when an asteroid was predicted to hit the earth. Even though he said this in jest, it still freaked out a lot of kids. Well, needless to say, those time frames came and went with nothing of significance happening. No Y2K. By the time the Harold Camping predictions came around, I didn't buy into that junk. There may have been some slight weirdness just because of past fear, but it was all pretty silly. So to make a long story more stretched, we've all seen this stuff before, and the world keeps turning. I understand how scary those thoughts can be, especially for children. If you are an adult with kids, it's your responsibility to stay calm for them, and for the love of them, don't feed their head with end of the world junk. I'm not a church goer, but if someone is religious and freaked, maybe have them talk to a church leader, as long as they aren't buying into this stuff. There are a few people that will need to be reassured during the next day or so. I'm quite confident that I'll have to spend the weekend with the inlaws. But for those who are still freaked, we've been through this crap before. And life is still good.
Hi Jess,
I didn't have parents who thought like this, but we had our own version. I grew up in the 50s at the peak of the Cold War. the church we attended was a nice, fairly stiff Presbyterian Church. Everyone was friends with the minister. So I got very, very scared when he got up and delivered fire & brimstone sermons. I was too little to really understand anything except that God was very angry at me, He was going to do terrible things to punish me, and no amount of trying to be a good girl was likely to do much to change that. At my school, we had air raid drills regularly. They were to prepare us in the event that an atom bomb dropped on us: we were to hide under our desks, face away from the windows, and shield our eyes.
My dad was a depressive. I inherited this from him. He routinely thought something terrible was right around the corner, and it caught on with me. Got right into my blood. Then we had the Cuban missile crisis. We were on the highway listening to the car radio, and the news was very dire, and my father got out of the car and leaned his head on the hood and wept, saying "we're all going to be blown to kingdom come". I was 13.
A lot of other stuff has contributed to the fear about 12/21 that I am battling down every minute (sometimes winning, sometimes struggling). I've lived through being brainwashed for 13 years by someone who alleged that she could cast spells, do magic, and foretell the future. She believed in a wrathful God. (Of course.)
my older sister died a few years ago, and I will always love her enormously. But she, too, was a product of our troubled family. She has OCD, psychotic depression, and crippling physical challenges that most of us never understood. but she was a brilliant cellist, a psychiatric social worker, and probably the kindest woman I will ever know. She was what I think of as a "pure soul".
To deal with her lifelong pain, she joined a Mega-church toward the end of her life. how a smart, culture, educated woman got from holding a degree in seminary to believing that every single word of the Bible must be taken literally, I'll probably never understand. But because we were so close, it rubbed off on me. And taking the Bible literally, I was about as sin-riddled as they come. Mostly with stuff I just couldn't fix. I marched through my adult life believing that I would burn in hell. I got very sick because of it.
Y2K and Harold Camping just about did me in. when I heard about 12/21/12 from my niece about eight years ago, I knew I was in for a rough ride. I've been hospitalized over this (remember the redwing blackbirds falling out of the sky on New Year's 2011? That was the final straw.)
What I feel today is that we, all of us, have a responsibility. there are so many vulnerable people out there who can't help being that way. I'm one of them. I'm also, sometimes, one of the strong ones. it's up to us to guide scared people away from the edge. As a few people here have said, we can't stop them from going over it if that's what they are choosing to do, by default or otherwise. I'm very grateful for the way this site has steadied me. I hope I can give something back.
All that said, I do want tomorrow to be over. I'm trying to work up the courage and optimism (I probably have a measurable deficiency of that) to schedule a haircut and color for Saturday. I look pretty ratty with my gray roots and split ends. Little things like this have been almost impossible to do. But I'm starting to do them. One at a time. Yes, life is in fact good.
Rattly