Time to buy guns and head up to the Berkshires?

Ok, is it just me or is this financial crisis scaring the living shit out of anyone else, huh? I've been totally obsessed with watching the Dow online for the past week. Every time I open CNN.com I pray that there isn't some new headline about how how the Dow just dropped by like 5,000 points and how 8 new banks just went, well BANKrupt.  

Being a moderately privileged kid, my parents and grandparents put a modest amount of money away in stocks for me for when I should want to go to back to school, buy a house, travel the world, buy a pinball machine, etc. and its been nice knowing its there, but I haven't really cared too much about it. However, now the stock market has gone down by something like 20% in the past week, I have to consider pulling my money and just putting it in my bank account.  Every day I think the market is going to turn back up, and every day it plunges even farther. I really don't know what to do, and I get the feeling no one else has any fucking idea what to do either. 

I'm also worried for my parents. This is happening to them at a really shitty time. They are planning on retiring in about a year. I thought it was bad enough that that housing market was tanking given that they plan to sell their house in Lexington in about a year, but now I'm sure they have lost maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just imagine everyones retirement funds, college funds, and nest eggs shrinking so much and it makes me sad.

More than that, I worry how much more the system can take before there is a collapse of the world economy. It seems every bank failure bring about another failure I feel like eventually the dominos falling are going to reach an unstoppable velocity. Yesterday I looked on CNN and the headline was "Stock Market Plunges Below 10,000 points" in big PANIC SIZED WORDS and I thought it meant the market had fallen BY 10,000 and I thought it was the end of the world, that chaos and violence would soon reign. Really, my stomach dropped and it made me feel sick. . .is anyone else having this terrible anxiety? 

So all this shit is making me stress about my money, my family's money, and the world's money. Its not a fun time. At least I have the Red Sox and Gossip Girl. Ah Jacoby and Blair, you help Mama through the hard times, you do, you do. . .