After the storm

taking stock of a media event and weather anomaly

On Saturday we were glued to the news. We kept checking the weather app. We checked into the LA Times, with it predictions and then its doomsday explainers featured prominently on its clickbait-y website. We stopped our paper sub because there was too much paper, but it did cause me about 80% less anxiety than the endless listicles about twenty things I’m not going to do but could do in the SoCal area.

Hillary disappointed us once again, but was it the combination of Hillary’s innate capacities as a Hurricane downgraded to a tropical storm or was it the media’s desperate attempt to shape a story that never ever contemplated the idea that maybe Hillary might miss us or weaken to such a degree that we could stop winding up our hand cranked radios?

We were told to pack go bags. We were told we could get sandbags from various locations. We were told to stay home, to pack our meds. To pack our pets’ meds. Our local Trader Joe’s saw a run on bottled water. On Sunday morning, the weary cashiers shook their heads with exhaustion. It was drizzled. It drizzled all day.

The rain got more intense as the day wore on, but the weather reporters on TV were more intense. At 11:45 p.m. the wind whipped up and there was more rain. I was worried, but I went to sleep.

When I woke up and checked the news, there were front page NY Times videos of flooded streets all over SoCal. There were videos of cars stranded in floodwaters. This is newsworthy? For the paper of note.

I went for a run. A forty foot tree had fallen over a path, roots out. The ground was soaked. It was raining lightly.

I hate to say this people, but I think we have a case of media induced Hillary catastrophe envy, on the part of extremely protected people who want to feel vulnerable.

It doesn’t help the climate crisis types because the hype and the hyperbole make us instinctually skeptical of weather modeling. All the weather reports showed satellite images and modeled predictions of the storm path, none of which came true.

I was a feckless young person living in Silver Lake during the 1993 Northridge Earthquake. We didn’t have go bags, I didn’t take meds, only non-prescription drugs. I didn’t have the Internet. I didn’t have a supply of bottled water. I didn’t have pets. There was NOTHING that the LA Times could tell me that could prepare me for an invisible freight train running under the middle of my bedroom for what felt like forever at 4:30 am. In bed, it felt like my brain was jello sloshing around in my skull. Then the earth moved up and down and it was loud. They don’t tell you that earthquakes are loud.

In 1993, I had flip flops and my glasses under the bed. I ran outside the apartment because my landlord had just told us how to turn off the gas and the water. I watched with my then partner and roommate all the power stations explode in the LA basin, until the whole night turned dark.

You don’t need some spray tanned person to tell you what to do when disaster hits. Clickbait won’t help you. Clickbait helps no one, but there is so much of it and it makes us cynical and hardens us to the woes of others.