Yesterday while I was doing some random activity which has already been forgotten, a memory from childhood popped into my thoughts. We were sitting on a stoop in Middle Village which is what people did in that sort of neighborhood with mostly two-family hoses attached or space very close together.
It was circa 1964 or five so I was a tween at the time.
So some religious group had said the world wold end that day at 4pm. Did we panic as some kids might? Nope! We sat on the stoop, probably 10 or 12 of us and waited to see what would happen at the designated.
Every strange noise from the main drag the next block over was the beginning of the end. And we waited.
I can't say how much time went by before we wrote it off to a hoax, but that was the extent of it. No discussion of live or death, or even of our own religion. All the kids went to St. Margarets except for the Jewish section of the Village. But they kept to themselves, so "everyone" was Catholic.
No keep in mind that that Elizabeth Loftus was my favorite researcher in Graduate school. If you have forgotten, she's most well know for her debunkment of "recovered memories" in the 80s. But her work goes far beyond that and I mention it because I am well aware of how faulty human memory is. So I rely only on a few images of my recollection and I'm sure that if I got together with those other kids they'd each have a different story.
So are kids not afraid of the world coming to an end? I'm from the world of "if I die before I work" Catholicism, so I should have been primed to think about it since I said the prayer containing that phrase almost every night.
Several more catastrophic endings have been predicted since then and obviously nothing has happened. So I have given up on magical thinking and deal with the world on the basis of the evidence of what it is.
I hope you're not waiting for a conclusion, since I don't have one. I just think it was an odd flashback.
At present am typing them and hopefully they might get printed in a magazine that pay money for subscriptions.