Disaster for ALL!!!

Snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon.

Apocalypse is, like, the end of the world. As in final destruction.

Amageddon is, like, the end of the world. As in Day of Judgement. As in last battle between Good and Evil.

Five inches of snow is, like, five inches of snow. Or, okay, maybe a little more. It get it. It snowed. A lot.

But last week we were inundated with a tsunami of hyberbolic posts on social media. With ginned-up, over-wrought media coverage.

I understand that cities like Seattle and Portland are not geared up (equipment, infrastructure) for harsh winter weather like Chicago and Minneapolis. But geez. Can we please ratchet down the disaster talk?

What does this disaster porn do for us? It makes us feel even more besieged, more vulnerable, more at the mercy of forces beyond our control than we have felt during the past two years of sinking in the quicksand of Trumpism.

And what a disaster for us all, as we are hammered by (and hammer ourselves and each other with) messages of our victimization, as we embrace what psychologists call Learned Helplessness, as we avoid the deep issues and challenges that don’t just zip across the landscape, dump on us for a few days, lose their force and move on.

The disaster of the recent northwest Snowpocalypse? It is that we have people who live on the streets, and cold weather, wet weather, snow make that life even harder and more dangerous than it already is. The disaster is that in Seattle (the ninth richest city in the US) in Portland (the oh-so-hip up-and-comer) in Eugene (so left-leaning it can’t stand up) tens of thousands of people live without shelter from the storm(s).

The disaster is not that the local hardware store is sold out of snow shovels. The disaster is not that it takes longer to commute in to work.

(Watch out! Careful! Read at your own peril! My two previous disaster posts are here and here.

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