Aha for 4-11-11

Facination with Disaster

It seems that there has been nothing on television and on the internet news sources lately but stories about disasters. When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan there was nothing but pictures and stories everywhere. I will admit I spent time watching the videos and looking at the pictures. They were amazing, the amount of devestation.

I have a friend that lives in Japan so I was trying to look at maps and photos to see if the area she lives in was affected. She lives around Kobe so she was safe from the worst of the damage.
Why are we so facinated by the misfortune of others. Millions of photos can be found on the internet showing natural and some un-natural disasters.

Floods from history as well as more recent and local events.

Forest fires, I personally witnessed one of the biggest in the history of Yellowstone in 1988. I lived in Cody that summer and there were some times when it looked like dusk at 10:00 in the morning. I would have a layer of ash on my car when I would leave work at night. Driving throught the Sunlight Basin and having fire on both sides of the road was an experience I don't really need to repeat.

Tornados in Iowa City and Parkersburg were both disasters that hit very close to home and affected people I knew in both locations.

All these events capture our attention and can be seen everywhere right after they happen. The internet provides us the opportunity to see many home videos and photos that are not included on the news, some of which you wish you hadn't viewed. I think back to when I was a kid, yes that was a very long time ago, and we would see articles in the newspapers and there might be a brief story on the nightly news but we didn't have access to the vast amount of information that is out there now. We as a world are so much more connected almost instantly. It might have taken days for news of the Japan earthquake to reach our local news but today it is with in minutes and we are hearing about it or seeing it on the news. It is amazing to me still how the sharing of information has changed over a very short amount of time.
My thoughts are a little deep today and maybe that is because I wonder how long will the earthquakes in Japan be called aftershocks and you have to wonder how they will recover from all that was lost.
The world's facination with disaster will not go away but it is certainly fed a much larger diet in this age of instant communication.