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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Crazy Childhood Fears - Nuclear Annihilation?

It seems like most kids have a fear of the dark, or maybe ghosts, possibly their parents or a creepy uncle or old relative. Maybe they’re afraid of dogs, or swimming, or spiders. Not me! My childhood fear was dying in a nuclear holocaust.

Now this wasn’t just some “I’m so scared of nuclear weapons, I don’t want to die, but I do want to eat only the middle out of the Oreos and wear my Luke Skywalker mask to the grocery store” weirdness. This was deep, ingrained fear that I actually thought about and contemplated in my five year old mind. I would lay in bed imagining a blinding light coming from over the horizon and wiping everything out. I would think about Mutually Assured Destruction, the term for what would happen if the Americans and the Soviets ever let loose their nuclear arsenals pretty much destroying everything (and probably the one thing that actually kept the Cold War at a stalemate).

I grew up a military brat, my father an officer, and I would pay attention. I would hear talk about the Soviets, about the Cold War, about nukes. And I took it heart. I imagined it happening. I had a deep and abiding fear that my life would end early and the world would no longer go on.

I guess that’s the thing, kids pay attention. They pay attention to what we say, what we talk about, what we discuss, for better or worse. They listen to our biases, they pick up on our conditioning, they assimilate our fears. Obviously, nuclear annihilation was a serious concern during the Cold War (my youth was spent toward the end of that ongoing conflict), at least serious enough around my house that it was the greatest fear I had growing up.

I just hope that, as my fear of youthful annihilation at the hands of an Atom Bomb did not come true, I did not tap into some prophetic future. Because man, when I would see it happening, it was fucking real. And it fucking sucked.

Crazy childhood fears…did any of you have any crazy ones?

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