Would like to go to sleep and wake up when it's all over...

[oursin]

Was thinking that when I was a young 'un (and in spite of things like polio, and the so-called 'Asian' flu, and the general prevalence of diseases that anti-vaxxers have forgotten were still a peril within living memory) the Big Threatening Horror was The Bomb -
Four Minutes Warning and then Oblivion, or maybe a radioactive wasteland inhabited by mutants...
I also remembered the beginning of Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie (1940): Sophia Garfield had a clear mental picture of what the outbreak of war was going to be like. There would be a loud bang, succeeded by inky darkness and a cold wind. Stumbling over heaps of rubble and dead bodies, Sophia would search with industry, but without hope, for her husband, her love and her dog. It was in her mind like the End of the World or the Last Days of Pompeii.
It is, of course, far more tediously tiresome, involving howling evacuees being loaded into buses, uncomfortable train journeys, etc. Not to mention the really ghastly Oxford-Groupy types her husband is mixed-up with.
Anyway, another song applicable to the situation I lately recalled: Bessie Smith, Safety Mama:

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