tin_can_telephone’s Weblog

I watched a show on the history channel tonight about locusts. It was absolutely horrifying. I wanted to stop watching, but I couldn’t. It blew my mind to see clouds of locusts, bringing instant famine wherever they decide to land by whatever random hand sets them down. Did you know that in 1874, a cloud of locusts covered 198,000 square miles of the western United States? That’s an estimated 12.5 trillion locusts. They blacked out the sun for days. That has to be the scariest thing I’ve ever heard of.

And they had all of this home video footage of locusts swarming fields in Africa and India and I got really tense watching all of this, worrying about food supplies and just how many people would die because of these stupid bugs. People for bugs. It’s maddening to think about.

Then I watched this show about earthquakes. They talked about this phenomenon called “earthquake lights” that occurs in the sky before, during, and/or after an earthquake. Lots of scientists doubted that it actually occurs until recently when they caught it on video. I looked it up on youtube and sure enough, there’s footage of these lights above Peru last year. The video is one of the eeriest things I’ve ever seen. People are huddled around in the street, marveling at the beautiful blue lights in the sky. Tranquilo, tranquilo. Calm down, calm down. There’s nervous laughter and oohs and ahhs. I can’t understand the spanish enough to know if the video is from before or after the quake. But imagine standing in the street staring at those lights. And then the earth begins to shake. It shook for 3 minutes, a magnitude 8.0 quake, killing over 500 people that night. And then there were the tsunami warnings. I can’t wrap my mind around those three minutes of terror followed by hours of waiting for a giant wave to wipe me and my town off the map. All the while, there are beautiful lights dancing on the sky above the suffering. The blue lights flash for a moment, just long enough to light up the roads, revealing the terrible scene all around: bodies and debris. And then the lights disappear again and there’s just darkness and fear.

I’ve don’t think I’ve ever been in a real situation of fear before (fear for my life). I’ve had plenty of moments when I knew I should be afraid but for whatever reason, it just didn’t click in. But I’ve never had a moment of complete vulnerability like being at the mercy of an earthquake in the darkness, or like being covered by a cloud of famine.

But it’s happening everyday. There’s the cyclone in Myanmar and just yesterday an earthquake killed 13,000+ people in China! It’s these kinds of things that make no sense to me. With man-made problems, I at least feel like I can identify a culprit (usually myself) and do something to address the root of the problem and make sure it happens less often in the future (theoretically anyway, efficacy and hope are completely different conversations). I can theoretically scratch problems of extreme wealth inequality, for example, by supporting things like micro-loans, debt forgiveness, fair trade policies, etc. But I can’t stop earthquakes and I can’t figure out who to blame.

And I suppose the point of this is that I just feel like a locust, waiting to be stepped on.