Where Were You?
by John Webster
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posted Aug 24 2011 5:46PM
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Okay, we don't get a lot of earthquakes in good ol' "nort deest Pee Yay", that is true. So when the earth moves under our feet (or select your cheesy earthquake-related lyric and insert here) it's natural that it gets our attention.
But gimme a break. An hour after it was over it was kind of obvious that it was all over and aside from those ten "What's going on here?" seconds I don't get the big deal.
Then it occurred to me.
Like the clockwork/snowstorm/there goes the bread, milk, toilet paper footage we see on TV news EVERY time it snows, the draw is the communal nature of it. We all (not all actually, I am one of those with "tremor envy", didn't even notice) made it through an earthquake. So what if it was less of an earthquake experience than the Earthquake ride at Universal Studios?
But that so many people did experience it, that it got so many people talking, that was the real story.
I take to my armchair psychology degree at the drop of a hat and I think what we had here was something akin to what we see in sports fans when we realize the word "fan" is the diminutive of it's root word, fanatic. I think it's human nature for us all to want to belong to something bigger than ourselves. That's why people call their favorite team "my team."
And that's why people, if only subtly, revel in knowing they "lived" through the Great Quake of 2011 and why the buzz was still buzzing more than 24 hours after the fact.
I hope we never get a serious, life-threatening, property-damaging earthquake. The one we had was less like an earthquake and more like going to a horror movie. It was scary but in the end we all knew there was no real danger. That's the kind of earthquake I like.
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