Confession of an End-of-the-World Junky

I believed that Ronnie Ray-Gun was going to push the Red Button. Didn't happen.

I read the lips of George the First about "No new taxes" (although I thought it was a ridiculous statement, far too unlikely to stick). Didn't happen.

I was constantly preparing to hide in the hills if the Reds got a few nukes through. Didn't happen.

I made some modest preparations for the crash of Y2K. Didn't happen.

There is a psychological predisposition among some people to obsess over and believe conspiracy theories and slanted news reports. This occurs on both sides of the fence. I admit to having been among the ranks of the extremists who have cried warnings against this or that entity, and literally on both sides of the bi-polar fence. I have learned and repeated the buzz-words and Names to Drop since Richard Milhouse Nixon (LBJ was just slightly before I started paying attention to politics).

Over time I have recognized that the emotional kick and intellectual high I get from doom-saying is not worth the embarrassment when my predictions continue to fail to manifest.

There is room for argument of principles. By all means, people who genuinely care about ideals and issues need to discuss them!

My "issue" is with myopic, adolescent extremism that constantly looks for, accepts, and often invents mud to sling at the Other Side. There is a sort of person that cannot perceive negativity in their own camp, and which sees only evil in the other camp . . . and magnifies (distorts) the bad aspects of the other above the current and former bad aspects of their own.

Again, it is not just Democans, but Republicrats do it, too.

"Only we have the true knowledge, the true faith! All others are false and wrong and to be eliminated!"

And if you pay enough attention, and watch long enough, you see the recurring patterns and the repeating plots.

It is said that expecting different results from consistent actions is insanity. Oil was going to go over $1 a gallon and it would mean global war! The faithful were going to be raptured into heaven and leave the non-elect to sweat it out on earth through all sorts of nastiness!

When Y2K failed to materialize, a switch flipped in my mind, and for the first time in my life I saw that I had fallen for just about every gloom and doom scenario spouted by mental-adrenaline junkies since the 1970's. Over three decades of watching for Catastrophe helped me to discover "perspective." Having seen the other side of terrible pronouncements that never showed up, I finally had to face the fact that I got a thrill from scaring myself and others over Dire Events, but that the cost of the thrill was intellectual dishonesty. I had to sell myself on shoddy evidence and the cardboard credentials of people who suffered from the same fright-aholism and "Chicken Little Disease" as mine.

Hurricane Katrina sent me back into readiness mode again, surprising me that I could still trick myself into just knowing that oil was going to become non-existent in the vicinity of the Gulf strike, that refugees were going to swamp the peripheral infrastructure, and that spin-off weather was going to ravage the territories including where I live. (I admit this so others might recognize the same trend in their own thinking . . . but the sad fact is, too many of us never outgrow this pitiful malady.)

And while Katrina was bad for NOLA, et al . . . I dumped my flush-water a week later and wondered if I, myself, would ever grow up.

There is a sort of person that likes to be the prophet of grim tidings, even if they do not come to pass. Over time I have grown tired of being that kind of person, and do what I can to keep my own disease in check, and shining the spotlight of "Here's Your Coffee, Smell It" to others similarly afflicted.

There will always be Jeremiah's whining about "The End Is Near," and other exaggerations.

As long as there are tabloid sooth-sayers, I will refute the distortions and unfounded biases. Tunnel-vision is bad for humanity, and I resist it when I stub my toes on it.