Katie Mack: I wasn’t on social media then — Subium • Bluesky web client

I still think this and I try to keep it in mind even while 80% of my feed is people expressing outrage and vitriol at anyone who isn’t wholeheartedly promoting some specific opinion about the best path forward for the world

I really do believe that most people are basically good, mean well, and want to have a positive impact on the world

Everyone is angry about the world and scared about the future and defensive on account of being pretty sure (correctly or not) that someone else is blaming them for something terrible and I don’t know if any of that will help but it’s probably useful to acknowledge what’s happening and breathe a bit

I don’t really want to armchair-psychoanalyze people but I swear I haven’t seen folks so constantly and universally marinating in their own stress hormones since like April 2020

Well, situation was pretty tense in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's up to the fall of Berlin wall.

I wasn’t on social media then

Trust me, it was awful. We had to share our hot takes on imminent doom on 3x5 index cards duct-taped to lampposts. Discourse could take weeks instead of hours, and whole threads could be lost if it rained. If you wanted to block someone, you had to take a Sharpie to their index cards.

Yes, but the newspaper of the time were not that much different. I remember the euromissile crisis in the 80's and this was very scary.

I also wasn’t reading newspapers in the 80s

And you did not see "The Day After" or "Treads".

No I was a small child

we got when the wind blows (1986). because someone, maybe because it was an animated cartoon, figured this would be appropriate for kids. it was really not.

I was also a small child. I remember when Reagan fell asleep at the UN, the fall of Berlin wall and was pissed off every time because it was interrupting MY TV shows. Get that bullshit grownup sad sacks off my TV

I saw all of it and lived through it. This is qualitatively different. So strange for someone who clearly did not, to try to invalidate what is happening right now.

Seriously. Like, yeah, I was born in the 70s, grew up with the kind of background dread of knowing the world was perpetually on the verge of nuclear destruction, but what's happening now is so much worse. For me, it's because it's completely internal. Like, these are *other americans*.

If this goes south the way it looks like it will, we're facing a situation where our entire country becomes the literal battleground in a second civil war, and I don't know if there's any place I'll feel safe until it's over.

I remember being shown "The Day After" in school, and the image of that little kid with radiation poisoning will forever be burned into my brain

My in laws told my wife at that time that if a nuclear war started their plan was to got outside the house to be sure to be killed.

In high school a major topic of discussion was whether it was better to run towards the flash and get it over with or run away from the flash and try and survive a little bit longer but it would probably hurt more. Of course we were half an hour outside of Midtown so we wouldn't have a chance anyway

In the 60' we got exercice in school in case of nuclear attack In the 40' my parent was afraid about German Submarine in the St-Lawrence River Each generation lived that It was worse for people in Europe during the war And now in Ukraine or Palestine or many other country

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