Wake-Up Calls

So I’m minding my own business, getting ready for bed, when the smartphone makes the most God-awful sound I’ve ever heard. It’s an alert tone, and the phone vibrates, too. I thought, earthquake? Tsunami? Al Qaeda? No, it was an Amber Alert, coming from a town more than 500 miles away, about a suspected child kidnapping.

Now I am all in favor, of course, of rescuing children and bringing kidnappers to justice. But do I want to be jolted into a heart condition by what amounts to a “be on the lookout” advisory? Such warnings should be limited to threats that could affect my or my neighbors; or community’s immediate safety, IMHO.

Fortunately, I can turn the Amber Alerts off on my phone (not that easy a task!). I also learned that there are several gradations of alerts – vaguely reminiscent of the Bush administration’s infamous color-coding system to warn us of a terrorist attack. I believe many institutions, and even a country or two, still use this kind of scheme. They also seem to agree that red is a bad thing – no political statement intended.

But the smart phone’s gradations include "Severe" alert. The next highest one up is "Extreme" alert, though I can’t for the life of me decide what the heck’s the difference between those two. Then there’s the "Presidential" alert. That one is apparently mandatory – the phone won’t allow me to turn it off.  I guess if we get one of those, we’re in really deep doo-doo.

My phone is special. It can display a little icon of seven guys in white robes with wings, all blowing trumpets. That really is Game Over. I wonder what that’s going to sound like. Trumpets, probably. But I’m sure when that event comes along, I won’t need the smartphone to play that sound – it will come from another source. Guess it will be OK to set the phone to “vibrate.”

Historic Proportions

That’s the phrase the forecasters are using to describe Hurricane Sandy. If on the Perfect Storm scale, the 1991 New England event was a Perfect 10, this could be a Perfect 11, or so they say.

I grew up in New York City, and the whole notion of almost 400,000 people being evacuated is a completely foreign concept to me. The only hurricane I remember directly impacting us in Manhattan was Donna. It seemed like a big deal then, but I was young.

The T-shirts tell us (bleep) happens, and our modern (bleep) threshold is pretty low. Where I live, the TV stations go into frenetic STORMWATCH mode if a couple inches of rain threaten. But many of us can pass a lifetime without every witnessing a real cataclysm.

Crater Lake is a beautiful spot in Oregon visited by many tourists. The water fills an old volcanic caldera. The volcano, called Mt. Mazama, erupted thousands of years ago. I read once where this enormous blast covered parts of western North America in feet – FEET – of volcanic ash. But our continent was relatively unpopulated. There were no Eyewitness News teams around to record what happened. The most we have are stories passed down through oral tradition, and whatever after-the-fact evidence scientists are able to collect.

For those who can’t live without their adrenaline fix, the Weather Channel has a show called “It Could Happen Tomorrow.” The fact is, it already has. Just as an aside, the 18th and 19th centuries brought major earthquakes to Boston and to Charleston, South Carolina.

(Bleep) really did seem to happen in the 19th century. A huge earthquake rocked not California, but the central part of the country, along Missouri’s New Madrid fault in 1811 -- again, a relatively unpopulated area, but the quake caused the Mississippi River to run backwards. In 1859, the worst recorded solar flare ever to hit the Earth caused telegraph wires to burn up. A similar flare hitting the Earth the same way today would cause a Biblical-level catastrophe. We wouldn’t need hacker terrorists to wipe out our electrical grid. The sun would have done that for us.

For most of us alive today, the standout natural cataclysmic event may be the Japanese earthquake of 2011, which killed tens of thousands and triggered a devastating tsunami and a nuclear disaster. Contrast that with last night’s partiers gathering on Hawaiian beaches to witness a tsunami a few INCHES high.

As for cataclysmic events, they actually happen all the time, but the slower-moving ones sometimes escape our notice, especially if we’re not directly affected. Famine. Drought. Climate change. The virus-du-jour. But it also seems most cataclysmic events aren’t Mother Nature’s fault. We’re much better at doing these things to ourselves. War. Recession/depression, you name it.

(Bleep) is always going to happen. The story really isn’t about the (bleep); it’s about how we react to it. Sometimes we react well; other times we freak out.

But so far, one thing seems to be constant: We survive.