Things to worry about while worrying that you’re worrying too much
At some point in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, some amateur social scientist whose name I’ve lost to history remarked that the innocent summer before 9/11 was barely notable save for an unusual number of shark attacks.
The point was that Americans suddenly longed to worry again about a couple of decidedly cranky fish in the surf at popular beach destinations rather than the next squadron of terrorist murderers piloting commercial aircraft.
It’s probably occurred to exactly no one, at least no one who’d put any thought into it, that the COVID-19 disaster requires a recalibration along these lines. Americans are desperate for a return to something resembling normalcy (or as The Onion put it in a headline just days after 9/11, “America longs for a return to mindless bull&*@!”).
Nearly 19 years later, the calculus has changed. We’re surpassing the death toll from Sept. 11 (2,977) every three days in the America of 2020, so our capacity for worry is far greater, meaning the things we might worry about instead of worrying about the virus are more worrisome by a corresponding degree.
Fortunately, by which I guess I mean unfortunately, Mother Nature appears to sense this shift in proportion, and she is currently crankier than all creatures appearing in “Jaws” 1 through 4 and in “Shark Week” 1 through 32.
Just look at what she’s cooking up for the next few months.
As we enter the peak of hurricane season (the hurricane playoffs don’t start until November), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association describes the elements necessary to produce deadly hurricanes as “hyperactive,” meaning plenty of warm ocean water, waves of climatic trigger mechanisms flowing off the west coast of Africa from a robust monsoon season, weak wind sheer, of all things, and apparently anything else that might contribute to the formation of a killer storm (murder hornets?) have taken up battle stations.
The next big storm will be named Josephine, if you’re into that kind of minutia, followed by Kyle, Laura and Marco (Polo!). Twelve names have already been chosen for the remainder of the season, so there’s plenty to worry about. Five names won’t be deployed because they’ve been retired for obvious reasons. We’ve had enough of Katrina, Camille, Andrew, Maria and Sandy.
Remember when we were being told that the official death toll from Maria in Puerto Rico was 64? Turned out it was more like 4,600. Good thing Trump went down there and flipped those people some paper towels.
So, yeah, 4,600 seems like an unconscionable number; it’s more than twice the death toll from Katrina (1,800) and more than 50% worse than the Johnstown Flood (about 2,000). Yet it’s well short of the 6,409 the United States lost on the worst day of the pandemic mess we’re in at the moment. One day, April 17, 2020 — 6,409.
Still, Mother Nature is trying hard to give you something else to fret about. Saturday in California the National Weather Service issued its first “firenado” warning.
You heard me.
In the foothills of the eastern Sierras, near the border with Nevada, officials spotted a cloud they described as “pyrocumulus.”
“The rotating columns of fire and whirls of the burgeoning cloud are capable of producing a fire-induced tornado and outflow winds in excess of 60 mph,” the NWS warned.“This is extremely dangerous for firefighters.”
No word on why they found it necessary to add that last part.
The things nature can do — hurricanes, floods, firenadoes, murder hornets, viruses originating in bats and transferred through some intermediary animal to humans — don’t scare everybody, maybe you’ve noticed. Check out the viral party video from the geniuses at the University of North Georgia as the Pandumbic rolled on over the weekend.
“The lack of humility before nature being displayed here, umm, staggers me,” Dr. Ian Malcolm says to the dinosaur designers in “Jurassic Park,” a quote for the ages from Michael Crichton’s novel.
Nature surely seems angry with us, which, at least for me, always calls to mind one of the all-time rants from the late great George Carlin.
“The greatest arrogance of all,” the great comic begins after a riff about self-importance, “is ‘Save the Planet.’ What? Are these [expletive] people kidding me? We don’t know how to take care of ourselves yet; we haven’t learned to take care of each other yet. We’re gonna save the [expletive] planet?
“The planet has been through a lot worse than us. ... The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re going away. Pack your [expletive] folks . ... We’ll be just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul-desac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.”
On second thought, maybe that idea about shark worry was the ticket after all.