As I type, the sky is yellow. Literally yellow. It's scary. I know the rhyme about red skies, etc., and I know to run like heck when they turn green (Indiana education), but yellow is new. I think I'll turn over to the Weather Channel for a minute and see if there's something I should know....
Oh wait, I forgot. The Weather Channel is now so busy running Voice of Doom programming and voyeuristic replays of the misery of others that you can't get a weather forecast from them anymore. Does anybody else find this disgusting? Why are there so many shows like It Could Happen Tomorrow? Why do people watch them?
One of the best things I gained from my time in Japan is an attitude about weather and earthquakes and so forth. In Japan, especially in the region I lived in, they are basically living on borrowed moments before a tidal wave obliterates everything that stands. Do you know what they do? They prepare the best they can AND THEY GO ON. They don't broadcast endless disaster scenarios. They don't show footage of computer generated people floating and flailing. They strengthen their buildings as best they can, they make evacuation and relief plans, they teach their children what to do, and they go on.
I don't think this preoccupation with disaster that America has developed in the last ten years is healthy. At any time of the day or night, you can find a show about the supervolcano just waiting to explode in Yellowstone, or the San Madras fault that runs down the Mississippi River, or another hurricane like Katrina. Who watches this stuff? Why? What can any single one of us do if that volcano opens up? What good does knowing how big a hole it might make if it does do for a person? Don't we have enough to worry about with the day-to-day struggle to live?
I really didn't mean to get up on this soapbox tonight, but here you have it. I guess I'll have to get my weather forecasts online from now on since the source with the word weather in its title has forsaken the real now for the worst case scenario.
I totally agree with your assessment of the "Weather" Channel. It has become like Mtv. Everything except music. During the Cold War with Russia (You know when there was a real and preventable threat of world destruction), there were bomb drills and films showing what to do. We had the mindset like they have in Japan. We prepared and went on. It's funny how a few years ago a hurricane almost hit New Orleans, and they warned at a direct hit flooding the city then. I guess they forgot. Don't even get me started on the differences of new coverage between a flooded New Orleans and a destroyed Miss Gulf.
ReplyDeleteI just can't understand the fascination with watching destruction over and over again. The daily news has enough current horror for anybody, I'd think. Why rebroadcast yesterday's tragedies in lurid technicolor? I'm not saying gloss it over and forget it, but at the same time, it ought to be against the law to drag out other people's pain and use it for your own ratings boost.
ReplyDelete