Being a student of Bible prophecy, I may have had some kind of edge over the low info ‘American,’ but there is really no excuse for fear, ever.
It’s all under his power, and he has told us what we need to know about how things will unfold. He has promised that we will not be subject to the rath, and I believe him.
Close is a personal judgment, so I suppose we were close and we were not close.
There’s one massive excuse for fear: it’s our news media’s number one product. Which is what I said at the beginning, for FIFTY solid years the media has found at least one and often two or three different “doomsday” scenarios to push on the public. Something terrible is always just about to happen, just turn on the news to find out. Now I’ve never really bought into it, but I’ve always been a news analyzer more than a news consumer, and the first think I learned on digging into these stories in the 70s was how obsessed the media was with selling it, which immediately caused me doubt, then I found out how many of their “predictions” had been false. Which is why I’ve never been a believer in these things, but there’s still plenty of people that are, though I sense a growing “doom fatigue” because so many people have grown up with this drumbeat and seen the predictions fail they aren’t listening anymore.
We DID go to DefCon 3 during the CMC, that is putting the Air Force at notice to put themselves at able to launch in 15 minutes. Documents released in 2002 show Kennedy thought the chance of going to war was 50/50. That’s pretty darn close.