This Is Only A Test

When big earthquakes hit, dazed residents can often be found wandering the streets surveying the destruction. Post-quake, sometimes the street is safer than being in your own home. When little earthquakes hit, dazed Howard Countians can be found wandering social media, asking the same few questions, looking for reassurance.

What was that?

Did anyone feel that?

I live here, what about where you are?

We just had a big THUMP. I thought my husband had dropped an amplifier upstairs.

But the first time we had an earthquake* I thought it was just the washer struggling on the last spin cycle. Then I noticed that our big bookcase was vibrating.

I am not a good judge of small earthquakes.

Guess what? Most of us aren’t, despite the fact that some folks were online announcing that they knew earthquakes and this wasn’t an earthquake.

I’m going to look to professionals on that one.

In any kind of emergency, or something unknown that feels like an emergency, it’s easy to take what little information we have and run straight for emotions. The facts-to-feelings ratio can get wildly skewed. I can’t ignore the fact that we are living in such a chaotic and dysfunctional time that it didn’t take much to move many of us into full-on crisis mode.

This might explain why a lot of people forgot what dialing 911 is meant to be used for.

These days we head to social media either to add more facts to our limited supply, or to find familiar faces to share our feelings with. That’s only human, or maybe, that’s only natural.

While watching this phenomenon last night I had the rather unserious thought that we were all quite a bit like prairie dogs sticking our heads up to assess the threat level of danger nearby. It’s not just a human thing.

Clearly I had the ability to weigh such frivolous concepts in my mind because my experience of the earthquake was mild. I was not afraid. I might have felt quite different had I been closer.

All of this is to say that pooling personal experiences on social media is 1.a great way to get a whole lot of anecdotal information in a hurry and 2. An opportunity for human contact and reassurance. It may not be the best way to get the big picture.

If this had been an actual emergency…

Village Green/Town² Comments

*I think it was this one:

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