I hope that millions of people read your response. Great job!!

I agree, Cary. In the end, the only thing we can control is how we live our lives as individuals. More importantly, we can attempt to master our perception of the situation in which we find ourselves. We cannot go through life trying to reach some certain endpoint, hoping along the way that the Ends Justify the Means. As we're fond of saying in our house, the Means are the Ends. The decisions we make every day are far more important than what we can do to change the world's mega-problems. Come to think of it, making these decisions in a considered, just manner is about all we can do!

Lets face it, doomsayers are gaining ground everywhere,

we're going to be either nuked, wasted away by AIDS

(finally getting really infectious), drowned, frozen or

frazzled to a crisp by global climate change, or

struck by a meteor or asteroid or who knows what.

Meanwhile "Science" still can't get the weather

right more than a few days ahead and people are flocking

to alternative/holistic medicine, new spiritual movements

and anything to get clear of narrow, limited 'expertise'.

We can't even predict the

stockmarket never mind the future history of mankind,

certain big egos and grandiose thinkers have just

got carried away thats all. The joy and terror of

living is its uncertainty, the utter mystery *still*

confronting us. "Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty

ridiculous", Voltaire once said. We live in an age

of manafactureed certainties and have lost our

ability to deal with and cope with what has always

been with us, the great unknown void of the future.

Protestant theologian Martin Luther was once asked what he would do if he knew with absolute certainty that the world would end tomorrow. He said, "Plant a tree in my garden today."

That's all we can do. Sooner or later we all die. Sooner or later, the universe will end. Meanwhile we have to find meaning and to make the most of living while we can.

Facing the reality of non-existence, either for ourselves or the planet is nothing new. In once sense, it's the human dilemma. We live each day knowing that at some point we aren't going to be alive any more. But to focus only on that fact leads to nothing but dispair and paralysis. So we have to live in hope and plant such trees as we can. There is no real alternative.

Have adults become such children that even the most simple and inane of questions deserve an answer: "How do I go on in the face of (perceived) impending doom?" And Cary takes this shit seriously! I suggest that he's either getting lame questions, or he likes to puff himself up to seem big to very small people: The answer is kill yourself and your children or shut up and keep moving! Can you imagine how "Mom Keeps Sending me A Shirt" and "The World is Gonna End So What Can I do?" would've done in the face of true adversity? The belly of a slaver? The stink of the concentration camp? The swoosh of a machette? People really suffer all the time - from hunger, from poverty, from disease, from war - and guess what, they don't need Salon to tell them to shut up and keep moving...

Maybe I shouldn't read shit like this on a Monday morning...

As another worried parent this question and your answer made my morning, thank you.

Jeffrey might read the exchange a bit closer and more sympathetically - for sometimes it is the simplest questions that are the most profound and most difficult to answer.

I think I will follow enjaybee's point and go plant a tree this afternoon.

Cary, you didn't respond at all to the writer's concern, repeated three times in her letter, about how to deal with her kids. This, to me, is the most important part.

The "apocalypse" or whatever we'd like to call it has always been just over the horizon - real or imagined - for all mankind forever. Remember, too, that we live in a world now where we understand that a solar eclipse isn't an omen of impending doom just as an earthquake isn't a punishment from an unhappy god.

In spite of this human beings have always looked forward, building civilizations and having children. This is the way it has always been and this is the way it is likely to always be. Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we [may] die.

Reading science fiction might help pass the time, too.

The best thing we can show our children is that we have hope for the future tempered with responsible actions to help ensure that future.

My five year old daughter watches me take the bus instead of drive. She loves the bus. She helps me plant the vegetable garden, can the produce, and open the jars to enjoy gorgeous fruit and vegetables in the wintertime. Next year, she will learn how to raise and take care of chickens (and no, I don't live in Utopia, but we're on 1.6 acres of mixed trees and meadow and that feels pretty darn lucky these days).

We talked about some of those doomsday articles this summer, because I was freaked out by the same ones. We talked about buying biodiesel, made from vegetables, instead of heating oil, which leads us into wars (that and lying presidents, was what she said LOL) to heat our house this winter, and also about wearing sweaters and using blankets.

We do all we can, and our kids learn from our example, whether that example is responsible stewardship or freaked-out cataclysmic thinking. Good luck.

I liked both the question and the answer very much. But to bring even closer Cary's advice and the concerns of parents, I submit that we can't even control our breathing that much. We're all just one breath away from dying, after all, and this means kids too! What is a more horrible future to envision: the one where the earth melts in thirty years, or the one where your child dies unexpectedly tomorrow? Since becoming a parent my worries and anxieties have certainly magnified, sometimes to my significant distraction and detriment, but my pleasure in a smile or a grin or a hug with my family and friends has also magnified. We're all on borrowed time, and we parents chose to bring our kids into that truth. So when Cary says accept it and move on, and breathe, and savor each new breath, and each new bubbling moment, I say: I'm doing my best, that's all I've got. And I need to help my kids learn to live this way too.