I vowed a few days ago to stay away from DKos to take a break from the depressing torrent of news regarding Republican/conservative outrages. It was a good break, and I will extend it a couple of more weeks. But first....
I saw this in the NYT. And, for all the laughing I and others have done about the rapturists, it is only now that I have come to realize that this thing really isn't funny. The children of these lunatics are paying a huge price.
One of the families portrayed is the Haddads of Middletown, Md. The parents are all "hooga-booga the end of the world!!!' and the kids are all "oh please.''
Some of their experience is funny:
"(Mom will) say, ‘You need to clean up your room,’ ” 16-year-old Grace said. “And I’ll say, ‘Mom, it doesn’t matter, if the world’s going to end!’ ”
But the rest of it is just tragic. Her parents left their jobs so they could hand out pamphlets proclaiming that the end is coming tomorrow. They stopped saving for their kids' college education. They stopped fixing their house, which has become run-down.
Worse is the torment that their children have been subjected to:
“My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven,” Grace said. “At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes.”
Her mom flat out says how sad it is that her three children probably won't be joining her.
“I have mixed feelings,” Ms. Haddad Carson said. “I’m very excited about the Lord’s return, but I’m fearful that my children might get left behind. But you have to accept God’s will.”
(Can you imagine your mom telling you any of this?)
The kids' views on life have been wrecked.
“I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore,” said Joseph, their 14-yerar-old, “because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.”
And it forces the kids to push their parents away from aspects of their lives:
“People look at my family and think I’m like that,” said Joseph as his parents walked through the street fair on Ninth Avenue, giving out Bibles. “I keep my friends as far away from them as possible.”
And it's not just that family:
Kino Douglas, 31, a self-described agnostic, said it was hard to be with his sister Stacey, 33, who “doesn’t want to talk about anything else.”
“I’ll say, ‘Oh, what are we going to do this summer?’ She’s going to say, ‘The world is going to end on May 21, so I don’t know why you’re planning for summer,’ and then everyone goes, ‘Oh, boy,’ ” he said.
The Douglas siblings live near each other in Brooklyn, and Mr. Douglas said he could not wait until Sunday — “I’m going to show up at her house so we can have that conversation that’s been years in coming.”
So, how do the jerks who put all of this "rapture" nonsense in motion feel about what they have caused? Just dandy.
Kevin Brown, a Family Radio representative, said conflict with other family members was part of the test of whether a person truly believed. “They’re going through the fiery trial each day,” he said.
Up until now, the rapture-ettes gave me a good chuckle every couple of days. But now I don't find it funny anymore. In fact, I feel like weeping for these poor innocents who have been harmed so deeply by fundamentalist fluffery.