| Tuesday February 11th 2003 LA was in town for most of last week and I didn't have much chance to update my site. I didn't even send my mom a birthday card, although I did remember to call her. I don't regret the distraction, but there's that nagging 'guilt' sign flashing over my head again ... On Saturday the 1st, I flipped on the television at about a quarter to ten and caught the big news about the Columbia explosion. It jolted me, but after the initial shock I found it didn't grab hold of me like I'd have thought a disaster of that kind might. I can think of three reasons. The Challenger disaster of 1986 already set a precedent. Jan 28th of that year is still strongly etched in my mind - the teacher coming into our class with the news, just before lunch hour; the pictures on television when I got home; the newspaper clippings I kept; the time magazine articles. The first teacher in space - they never did try that again, did they? So there was nothing new about a shuttle explosion in 2003. 9-11 displayed disaster on a scale previously unimagined. That day still haunts me even now, whenever I start thinking about it again. I can easily relive that whole series of events in the morning; I'm still occupying the same cubicle I did then, still typing at the same computer. It's not hard to get a flashback. Nobody was prepared then, including myself, for news like that. Now I think we're subconsiously braced for it. In that sense, the world really isn't the same anymore. The third reason could simply be the lack of television imagery. All we have are photos that look like shooting stars; there's no enormous cloud explosion, with booster rockets soaring off in either direction. There's no collapsing buildings in the middle of a downtown core. There's no image that sticks in the head, really - it's all left to the imagination. Something else happened that made me think. In 'other news' that day, there was scarcely a minute's coverage given to a train wreck in India (I think? tells you how little coverage, I guess) that killed something like forty people. I think the old me would have said the Columbia disaster was the greater news story, definitely. Now, I'm not so sure. 7 versus 40. Astronauts who knew the danger, versus people going about their everyday lives. The Columbia disaster didn't leave the mark of hurting our illusions of infallibility, the way previous ones have. I'll remember the 7 - but let's try to remember the 40, too. |