So I took the Serenity Quiz, and when it asked “Have you suffered in war?” and “Have you lost something important to war?“ I answered in the middle, because frankly, the Cold War was hell on little kids from small towns where the religious-types wanted desperately to believe that they were the last bastion of defense against the Godless commies who were determined to blow us all away.

     We were openly fed fear of the communist hordes of both China and Russia at the little rural church where I went to Awanas…but in my family’s own middle-of-the-road Lutheran church there was plenty of that as well.  A number of Sunday School teachers really enjoyed handing us stories of death and persecution that Christians faced, and that we would face if the commies and their minions managed to take over our country (which we were assured they were tirelessly trying to do).

     One Sunday School teacher really focused in on the book of Revelations, and it was a favorite book in the other church as well.  I had friends from both churches who were obsessed with Revelations, and the obvious extrapolation that the end times would be nuclear Armageddon.  It would pit the forces of God (us) against the forces of the AntiChrist (them).  If you've read revelations, you understand why I have absolutley no need to watch horror movies.  Had enough as a grade-schooler, thanks.

     We were supposed to be brave little soldiers, for God.  It was sort of a foregone conclusion that we were all going to die horrible, fiery, mangled deaths (unless we got raptured, which was clearly not going to happen to me)  What we had to do, was find a way to be OK with that, because we were going to do it for God.

     Later conversations with Fundies brought the response “Well, that’s all wrong.  You completely misunderstood the message.”

     Oh great, you tell me that NOW.  You would have thought that attending a couple hours of religious education at AWANA’S every week, and attending an hour of Sunday School every week, and 1-2 hours of worship service every week would have lead to a clearer picture.  I mean, you’d think SOMEBODY would have mentioned it.  You would think that there would be no way I could mistake the message.

Oh wait.  I didn’t mistake it.  Here’s what I was taught:

1)      Memorize your Bible, chapter and verse.  Every verse you can because if you end up under the heels of Communist dictators, you’re going to need your Bible, and they will kill you for owning one, so you need to have it in your head.

2)      Be right with God every single day.  Make sure that you are right with God.  ‘Cause if your not; then when the big bad Commie boogie man gets it into his crazy brain to punch the button, God’s going to leave you to fry…and you don’t want that.

3)      Get all the people you love to be right with God every single day, because you would hate to be taken into heaven and have to watch them fry.

4)      You could die any minute. Really, any minute.  Are you right with God?  Are you really?  Like, right now?  ‘cause you know…you don’t want the mushroom cloud to answer that for you.  Are you sure there’s not some little bit of sin you missed?

     That’s in church.  Of course, you would think that our “liberal dominated Godless public schools” would have countered that message.  No such luck.  They showed us “The Day After” and “Red Dawn” in our CIVICS CLASS.  A class that evidently was meant to teach us to have terror, and then deal with it by becoming terrorists.  Oh wait…”Freedom Fighters”.  Yeah…that’s it.  I’m actually surprised they didn’t show us Rambo III in school.  Maybe it was the language that kept that from happening.  You know, the one where a Buddhist Sylvester Stallone eventually sheds his Non-Christian religious principles and goes to Afghanistan and helps the brave, patriotic freedom fighting Mujahedeen fight the Godless commies?  (The implication being that if it hadn’t been for his Buddhist pacifism, his former CO wouldn’t have been captured in the first place.)

     Ugh.

     No, I didn’t put down high ratings for suffering in war.  I was never starving, I didn’t lose my family, my home was never destroyed.  I’ve never been shot.  I’ve never had to kill someone to save myself.  I've personally known people who actually did suffer and lose in fairly hot wars, ad I don't want to diminish the much more viscreral and stark nature of what they went through. 

     But I, like many of my generation and the one before it, lived with the pervasive belief that we would not grow up.  We lived with the pervasive belief that the end of the world was imminent, inevitable, and that the best we could hope for was to play the proper role in its destruction and our own.

     And we spent way too many years doing, thinking, and believing what we were told just because it was the best comfort we had.  Until we realized we were being had, and then we spent way too many years in a void of nihilistic apathy tinted with anger and loathing…of ourselves and others.

     So, yeah.  There’s nothing heroic about it.  There’s nothing special about it.  There’s nothing unique about it…but I suffered in war and I lost something important to war.  Even if it was just a little bit, and kind of lame to next to really suffering and losing in a real shooting war; it was still unecessary and too much...

     …and the fact that nobody seems to have learned a gorram thing and are letting it happen again is more than a little discouraging