Everybody hear about everything going on in Japan? You didn't? What rock were you living under for the last week? Yeah, apparently there was some kind of unmitigated disaster consisting of one of the largest recorded earthquakes of all time, an enormous wall of water over four stories high, and a series of nuclear reactors failing in reponse to the unprecedented shitshow that they had just been subjected to. Thousands dead, millions homeless, untold of environmental consequences.
This is the shit bad movies are made of. This is like Deep Impact rolled up with The Day After Tomorrow, albeit on a smaller scale. By the way, does this officially put Japan into first place on the list of places where ridiculous disasters happen? Talk about your bad karma: the only country to have combat fatalities due to a nuclear detonation, and now this.
But the most interesting aspect of this whole shebang? The virtually zero effect that it has had on the rest of the world, specifically the United States. Now, I know that ultimately there will be fallout. People will lose money in foreign investments due to crashing Japanese stocks. The car industry is likely going to have an enormous shake up (although I'm having a hard time seeing how this can't benefit American automakers.) But meanwhile, season 57 of Survivor is still on tv. The NFL owners and players are still having a kindergarten-esque slap fight over how to split up the truly obscene amounts of money they have at their disposal. And Charlie Sheen is still a folk hero cum douche rocket.
You know that feeling where you can be simultaneously amazed and disgusted at the same time? That's how I feel now. Because on the one hand it is damn impressive that an event of this magnitude can occur and not ruffel a hair on the head of roughly 96% of the world's population. On the other, it is ghastly. Does this speak to mankind's resiliency, or our callousness?
No comments:
Post a Comment