All dressed up and nowhere to blow
Like probably ninety percent of the population, I followed Hurricane Rita’s approach from the time it was an itty-bitty baby out in the Atlantic. The last news I heard before heading to bed last night was that it was expected to come ashore some three or four hours after that.
Seven a.m. bam, I’m outta bed and downstairs, clicking through the channels to see what happened. Since NBC had on a golf tournament (At 7 in the morning. Boggles the mind.) and being as I live in one of the five cableless households left in the country, I switched back and forth between ABC and CBS.
The commercials were more exciting.
Not that everyone wasn’t wearing their Serious Faces, and doing their best to inject appropriate gravity into their voices as they stood in Galveston or Houston or Beaumont or Port Charles. But the fact was, after Katrina, news of uprooted trees and downed power lines just wasn’t gonna cut it.
Now here comes the sick part: I felt as cheated as all those correspondents clearly did.
Let me (quickly and fervently) interject here that I don’t get off on other people’s suffering. I was horrified at Katrina’s destruction and was incensed by the lack of timely response for many of the victims. I cried for their loss, and cried again each time I saw a family reunited, or entering their new apartment for the first time. I can’t imagine the gut-wrenching feeling of finding nothing left of your home except a pile of boards or having to pick through the debris, hoping to find slivers of your life. And yet, I have to admit an almost ghoulish fascination with the power of the storm itself.
Clearly I’ve watched far too many disaster movies.
How big could it get? I wondered. How hard could the wind blow? What kind of damage could a Category 5 do if it came ashore at Houston? I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, certainly. Or lose their homes. So why was my relief, when the storm began to fade, tempered with — dare I say it? — disappointment? Is it because we’ve become so complacent about increasingly spectacular special effects on the big screen that we — or at least, I — have at least partly forgotten that in real life, big booms aren’t fun for anyone involved?
Or — even worse — have our lives gotten so boring that we’re reduced to finding other people’s tragedies entertaining?
Scary.
