How To Scare the Children

According to a recent study, one in three children (ages 6-11) are afraid the Earth will not be around when they are adults.
According to the study, minority children have more anxiety about the end of the world than white children. Girls worry more than boys, urban more than suburban.
They worry about a major weather catastrophe and they are concerned of animal extinction. They are concerned that no matter what we do, the world will be destroyed. (www.treehugger.com)

I pondered why that is. Then I remembered the fear I had in the 70's that the world as we know it would be destroyed, no- not by global nuclear annihilation, (and I lived near missile silos) but by GLOBAL COOLING Yes - you read that right.

We were being inundated with "scientific evidence" that the world was cooling at such a rate, we could expect an ice age within 20 years. The ice glaciers would be covering MOST of the continental United States, covering most of the farming states, bringing about famine, death and disease.
The rain forests would cease to exist, because the area would be too cool to sustain the forests, and without new trees to cover the planet, oxygen levels would decrease and Carbon Dioxide would increase and the population would decrease and many bloodlines would fall away.

If that didn't kill us, a giant meteor would crash into the planet and kill us like the dinosaurs - as they talked about how we only watched a tiny portion and another one would come at anytime...

We are doing the same things with our children - but worse, now they are inundated with these messages at school, on the internet, over cable TV. They saw horrible visions after Katrina and the Tsunami. This is followed up with Discovery telling us "This is what would happen if it hit the US" and Al Gore running around saying the weather is directly related their evil parents who don't care about the planet...

No wonder they are afraid.... Come on! We can do things to help the planet without scaring the hell out of our children!! We can take steps without totally destroying our way of life...

Well - except for the damn mercury filled lightbulbs...

Off my soapbox