Kicking Fears in the Asshole

As a kid I was terrified of two things.

Nuclear War

Tornados.  (No, not the delicious deep fried snack food).  Click on the photo to enjoy the awesomeness.

Truly, there was nothing I hated more than seeing this shit:

or this:

 

Sometimes it was really bad:

 

This was bad enough:  The Guyana Jonestown Massacre was bad enough. I remember this clearly, and the concept of one man being able to talk people into doing the most horrid of actions petrified me. Cult behavior still scares the shit out of me, but back then for the most part, when the National Network broke in, it meant two words in my mind:

They. Launched.

I battled these fears on the nightly quite often. I go deep into the nuclear end here.

I figured out a way to combat those fears and make them, at the least, tolerable.  That was knowledge.  I began watching documentaries and reading books about the subjects, and learning the roots and creations of these destructive forces, and that brought them down to my level.

Books like Gerard DeGroot's The Bomb: A Life, Stephen Walker's Shockwave, Richard Rhodes uber-thick Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Peter Kuran's genius film  Trinity & Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, brought the humanity of the nightmare into the picture, and for some reason, made it less scary overall.  The Nuclear Weapon is a human conceit, and therefore under control of people.  I learned that no one wants to make Mutually Assured Destruction happen, and that launching one takes the involvement of more than one person with that goal in mind.  Highly unlikely. (I hope).

The tornado is not under any control.  As stated, a nuclear weapon is something only a human being can unleash upon the world.  The tornado, is the child of the supercell thunderstorm, but does not obey the orders of any parent. It obeys no road maps, is affected by no conditions, no construction, no landforms.

So I did the same research.  I did the reading and learned how the tornado formed, the history of its damage, and the odds.  I tried to relay this upon my kids.  The odds of a tornado forming, let alone forming above you are small.  Not impossible, but very small.  I don't know if this has helped my kids deal with their fears in any way.  However, as a kid myself, when I did the math in my head, and actually saw one in person, the fear became a subtle background issue, and not a walking nightmare.

There's a reason there are people called storm chasers.  Tornados don't come to you often enough to have that around the clock, gut-rot fear.

Now, I just have to get around to doing something for that fear of cults.  I'm halfway through the terrifying Raven,  (I had to take a break, the writers' cold unemotional description of vividly horrid events seemed a little too unnerving) and the way these people drifted to Jim Jones, and did what he wanted, seems all too familiar.

Some people can talk themselves into listening to and obeying anyone.