You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The Japan Earthquake.
The devastation is incomprehensible. The images are from a Steven Spielberg movie.
I don’t know whether to cry or look away.
The biggest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history and we are watching it unfold in real time.
It only gets worse with each passing minute.
I haven’t felt this uncomfortable watching TV, this engrossed by what I am seeing since 911 when the sky was falling and the landscape of America was changing before our very eyes.
This is an indelible moment in history. It has been chronicled from the beginning. Each rumble, each gasp of devastation preserved for the world to study and watch forever on YouTube.
The “brutality of the reality” is so visceral your eyes are drawn to the screen like a moth to a nuclear candle.
I just can’t believe what I am seeing. Cars floating like boats down rivers of filth. Boats floating like cars down city streets filled with death and confusion.
The magnitude of mother nature’s wrath is on a scale that my brain is not prepared to quantify. It’s like asking for a beer and someone opening a keg tap in your mouth and not stopping until 16 gallons has emptied itself in a disgusting, nauseating flood. The wretched unstoppable liquid flows down your throat, over your cheeks, into your nose, across your face, into your eyes, saturating your clothes, onto your shoes, onto the floor, across the bar, under the tables, out the door, into the street, across the field, over the buildings, sweeping away cars, to the nuclear power plant that eventually explodes in a swamp of stale beer.
Makes you want to check into a spiritual AA meeting and ask the mighty creator what we did wrong?
As I continue my visual inhalation of the atrocity, I see one shaky camera shot of people running to glass falling from a sky scraper to people crying to ceilings collapsing.
But that is pedestrian, almost a yawner. These pictures are like file footage of every earthquake you have ever seen compared to what this disaster has spawned.
I have seen unbelievable video captured of 23 foot walls of water consuming city streets, crushing homes, and tossing cars like Lincoln logs. I have seen boats float backwards down avenues filled with ATM’s and Street lights.
SURREAL!
But even this is child’s play.
The most unfathomable, almost unbelievable, certainly surreal video of this visualized insanity is the picture of the whirl pool. Yes I said the word: WHIRLPOOL.
When is the last time you saw a whirl pool except in your child’s bath tub.
The video was mind boggling, as a circular vortex in the middle of the sea was spinning and a boat was on the outer cusp was trying to navigate to safety. It looked like a NASA weather shot of a spinning hurricane from space.
As I watch FOX NEWS this morning, just the crawl at the bottom of the screen is alarming and hard to even process.
9,500 missing.
Death Toll Mounting.
Radiation leak.
“They can hand out iodine to the residents,” the anchor says.
Iodine V Nuclear reactor leak?
Talk about slow death. Anyone up for a thousand dental xrays all at once?
The images are breath taking in a horrible kind of way.
A brown wave of sludge steam rolling over a green landscape.
A compression shot of a nuclear reactor belching and then a cloud of mysteriousness rising into the air. Yikes!!
The anchors can’t adequately dissect what they are seeing. They are all over the map, but always seem to rendezvous back at the horror of the nuclear plant.
“Aftershocks at the nuclear plant,” the anchor says. “There’s been an explosion, a melt down, there’s been an evacuation zone established.”
Evacuation zone? Where is everyone going to go? France?
As if the video isn’t reminiscent of End of Days, FOX gives it that little FOX extra with deep, dark chimes, alerting me to the fact that this isn’t the O’Reilly Factor.
“The death toll is mounting”
“Walls crumble at Nuclear power plant”
“Thousands evacuated. Zone expanded to 12 miles”
12 miles? That’s because Japan is an island and you can only go so far till officials say; “OK, that’s all we got. Stop here.”
It’s amazing that everyone is not dead based on the devastation on my screen.
As if there isn’t enough to talk about, a parade of so called experts take the FOX hot seat and begin spewing.
“What we haven’t even talked about,” One doctor says, “is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. What is the emotional impact on the population?”
Dude you are on set about a week too early. PTSD?
What about Present Traumatic Stress Disorder. After-shocks of 6.8 are bigger than the S.F. Earthquake, so let’s count the dead and find grandma and then you can tell me how school children will have nightmares for years to come.
Then there’s Governor Huckabee talking about donations to Japan. The anchors say the US deficit won’t allow for charity. Huckabee says it will come down to private donations. He says this is when America is truly the leader of the world. He is right.
Then there’s the guy with the fancy title who is talking about the global effects of one nuclear power plant exploding.
“nuclear fall out could affect the united states. Smoke and particulates get into the atmosphere. It could travel around the globe. We don’t know yet. Some of it would reach the USA. You wouldn’t die. It’s like being exposed to asbestos.”
Hey Dr. Douche bag. Shut your pie hole. I don’t need the uneducated guess at what could happen to me half a planet away. You are spitting stupid into the airwaves by predicting the direction of the wind and nuclear fall out without so much as a thermometer to back up your data.
I have a better chance of sticking a garden hoe up my own ass today than I do of breathing Japanese Nuclear Cloud.
Just shut up and get the hell off the set. You are making me want to kill you.
Thankfully they bring on a doctor who refutes Dr. Douche bag’s uneducated guess.
“Its all about exposure” he says. “What are the long term genetic impacts on DNA. Frankly I don’t think there’s much of a threat to anyone in the USA”
And there you have it. One guest tells me to get my spiritual house in order. The next guest tells me I probably should keep that appointment with the bar stool for the start of the NCAA basketball tournament on Thursday.
And that’s it. Thanks to 24 hour news, I could sit and watch this all day and feel like the world is coming to an end.
Or I could shut off the TV, go work out, and enjoy the sunshine today, because it is going to be a beautiful day half a world away.
And that is crazy