I guess it was the first face-off between parent and teacher in Carrie’s life. She was a little freaked in first grade about some impending disaster reported as fact in her science class – global warming, the death of the ozone layer, or something. We were riding in the car, and she asked me what I thought (in first-grade language, of course) about the certain impending doom of planet.
I found myself speaking from the depths of my soul – using words I’d never put together in the same sentence before.
“Carrie,” I said, “never, never, never believe anyone who would make you afraid of the future.”
I came by that honestly. I remember asking my dad at about the same age, “Did you know that the Russians have enough bombs to destroy every American?” He replied, “Yes, and we have enough bombs to blow up every Russian.” That more or less ended the Cold War for me. (By the way, you just haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Shout to the Lord” sung in Russian. Those American Idol contestants got nothin’ on our brothers and sisters in the former Soviet Union.)
This all came back to me last week. I was shopping with my wife at Walmart and passed a display of some sort of DVD series or books or something. The basic idea was, “spend your money on this to learn about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.” I passed.
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