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This is Not a Column

By Gloria Diaz

Check out Gloria's Blog — Edge of Gloria!

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-01-20

A few weeks ago, I went on a real, honest-to-God vacation, the first one in over ten years. My trips to San Francisco don't count, because those included writing conferences — dawn-to-dusk, packed full of facts and contacts, and I might have had two, maybe two and a half days at most, to indulge my love of shopping and taking pictures. This vacation included swimming on Christmas Day (yes, I finally got to post a picture of myself and be that obnoxious jerk in the ocean) while the folks back home are shivering. Just one more thing to check off my bucket list. My hostess and her son and I slept late, ate seafood, and really didn't plan for a whole lot. No marathon days of touring zoos, shelling, kayaking, then catching a firework display. Just, you know, whatever.

So when I heard about the not-false-emergency-warning alert that actually WAS false SNAFU in Hawaii, I wondered, had I been on vacation there, what would I have done? The alert went off shortly after eight a.m. Would I have heard it? If I had, what could me and my vacation mates have done? If we had been in a similar condo, I suppose we would have hidden in the garage, freaking out with the tenants of the three other units.

Really though, what COULD we have done? Where would we have driven? I haven't given fallout shelters any thought since what, the 1990s? I remember having to watch The Day After as a homework assignment for some English class I had. The Cold War was still raging. U.S. good, U.S.S.R. bad. Commies go home. The threat of nuclear war hung over us, until the longer we went, the more we relaxed. Until a few weeks ago.

If I'd been by myself, I'm not sure what I'd done. Probably crap my pants, change underwear, then crawl back under the covers, because it's not like I could outrun a missile. Do bomb shelters even exist anymore? Do millennials even know what the fallout shelter sign looks like?

Given the current political climate though, this mistake was not funny. Although I did get a moment of schadenfreude watching footage of people in Hawaii running to hide somewhere. After all, it sucks when it happens to me, but it's hilarious when it happens to you. The cynic in me is convinced this is just one more way the powers that be control us with fear. Hey, wouldn't it be funny if two world leaders got into a “who's button is bigger” pissing contest and someone hit the emergency alert by mistake? Depends (ha! Pun intended) on whose side you're on.

This new year is off to an interesting start. False emergency alerts and shithole countries. I'm thinking it's time to write a musical about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but turns out Alexander Bermange beat everyone to it. Can Shithole: The Musical be far behind?