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rfmcdonaldOn the 13th of January, 2018, when the world learned of an official warning of an impending ballistic missile attack on the state of Hawaii, I was in the American Museum of Natural History with friends. Scott mentioned the warning and flashed me a screen of the screenshotted image of the message from Twitter. I felt stunned. Certainly I'd not been aware of any catastrophic worsening of the United States' relations with North Korea or anyone else, so this couldn't be true. But then, this was a wholly unprecedented event in any case, something no one on this world had any experience with. Who was I to say that this might not be the first I'd learn of another world-changing event in my life? I hoped only that the people I knew and love in Hawaii would be safe.
Thank God that this was simply a false alarm, consequence of an appalling badly designed user interface that does not clearly distinguish between different options for issuing state-wide alerts and consequence of the state governor's unconscionable ignorance of his Twitter password to let the world know of the false alarm. (It does not take 20 minutes to reset a password, at least not on any system I'm familiar with.) It goes without saying that, beyond being a terrifying experience for people in Hawaii and decidedly unsettling for the rest of the population of the world, this sort of alert has potentially catastrophic consequences. What if this false alarm was seized upon as justification for some response? That so much of the world lacks even Hawaii's flawed preparedness, meanwhile, is worrisome. Mack Lamoureaux's suggestion at VICE that the first warning Canadians would learn of a missile attack would be fro the nuclear shockwave, unless they signed up for text message warnings which are (first) voluntary only and (second) distributed through an ad hoc combination of ministries and telecom providers is--Well.
One element of the affair that interests me hugely, from a sociological perspective, is the way people in Hawaii dealt with the alert of their potential imminent doom. I may have missed reports between my New York City vacation and the hindrances of later retrospective news searched, but I do not think any of the violence that apocalyptic media tends to predict will occur in these circumstances--looting, violence, riots--actually did. Perhaps it might have if there have been a longer period of more severe tension, but I frankly doubt it. What we did see was people doing their best to try to do as much as they could with the remainder of their lives, to find explanations for what was happening and to share them, to seek shelter, to tell the people they cared for that they cared for them. People tried to protect themselves and others, and, where they thought they might not be able to, they tried to let their likely survivors know just how much they mattered. I think this speaks well of humanity, honestly--if this was a test, we passed.
This brought to my mind Ultravox's 1984 single "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes", sung from the perspective of a man desperate to get home to his family before the predicted nuclear apocalypse came about.
This song is ostensibly about a nuclear plant meltdown, not a nuclear attack. This song was also sung in the 1980s, released in the same year as (for instance) the BBC's post-nuclear apocalypse Threads (now on Blu-Ray!). Especially two years before Chernobyl and at the arguable height of the post-détente Cold War, nuclear apocalypse most certainly did include fears of warheads going. Its inclusion on Wikipedia's long list of song's dealing with nuclear war, a noteworthy trend in the 1980s' popular culture--that decade's sheer density ofsongs dealing with the nuclear apocalypse is something I've noted for decades.
That moment when I made the connection between Hawaii now and Ultravox then is when it hit me: We're back in touch with that 1980s mindset. The adulthood I've enjoyed free from fears of nuclear war, free from the contamination it inflicted on earlier generations and even on my childhood, is over. We feel the same threats the 1980s' generations did; we respond in the same ways, largely irrelevant details like the communications technologies we have aside. (I doubt a false alert of a missile attack on Hawaiian television in the 1980s would have differed that much.) The idyll I, and most of the rest of the world's population, enjoyed for decades is done with.
Thank God that this was simply a false alarm, consequence of an appalling badly designed user interface that does not clearly distinguish between different options for issuing state-wide alerts and consequence of the state governor's unconscionable ignorance of his Twitter password to let the world know of the false alarm. (It does not take 20 minutes to reset a password, at least not on any system I'm familiar with.) It goes without saying that, beyond being a terrifying experience for people in Hawaii and decidedly unsettling for the rest of the population of the world, this sort of alert has potentially catastrophic consequences. What if this false alarm was seized upon as justification for some response? That so much of the world lacks even Hawaii's flawed preparedness, meanwhile, is worrisome. Mack Lamoureaux's suggestion at VICE that the first warning Canadians would learn of a missile attack would be fro the nuclear shockwave, unless they signed up for text message warnings which are (first) voluntary only and (second) distributed through an ad hoc combination of ministries and telecom providers is--Well.
One element of the affair that interests me hugely, from a sociological perspective, is the way people in Hawaii dealt with the alert of their potential imminent doom. I may have missed reports between my New York City vacation and the hindrances of later retrospective news searched, but I do not think any of the violence that apocalyptic media tends to predict will occur in these circumstances--looting, violence, riots--actually did. Perhaps it might have if there have been a longer period of more severe tension, but I frankly doubt it. What we did see was people doing their best to try to do as much as they could with the remainder of their lives, to find explanations for what was happening and to share them, to seek shelter, to tell the people they cared for that they cared for them. People tried to protect themselves and others, and, where they thought they might not be able to, they tried to let their likely survivors know just how much they mattered. I think this speaks well of humanity, honestly--if this was a test, we passed.
This brought to my mind Ultravox's 1984 single "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes", sung from the perspective of a man desperate to get home to his family before the predicted nuclear apocalypse came about.
This song is ostensibly about a nuclear plant meltdown, not a nuclear attack. This song was also sung in the 1980s, released in the same year as (for instance) the BBC's post-nuclear apocalypse Threads (now on Blu-Ray!). Especially two years before Chernobyl and at the arguable height of the post-détente Cold War, nuclear apocalypse most certainly did include fears of warheads going. Its inclusion on Wikipedia's long list of song's dealing with nuclear war, a noteworthy trend in the 1980s' popular culture--that decade's sheer density ofsongs dealing with the nuclear apocalypse is something I've noted for decades.
That moment when I made the connection between Hawaii now and Ultravox then is when it hit me: We're back in touch with that 1980s mindset. The adulthood I've enjoyed free from fears of nuclear war, free from the contamination it inflicted on earlier generations and even on my childhood, is over. We feel the same threats the 1980s' generations did; we respond in the same ways, largely irrelevant details like the communications technologies we have aside. (I doubt a false alert of a missile attack on Hawaiian television in the 1980s would have differed that much.) The idyll I, and most of the rest of the world's population, enjoyed for decades is done with.
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