We (literally) can’t catch our breath between Bridge Collapse Sundays and Toxic Water Mondays
Since 2020, we have had countless alarming moments that should have served as a reminder of how connected we are, and how dependent we are on each other’s actions or inactions.
A friend recently joked that it was time to start keeping a Dystopia Calendar to remind us of which essential element — clean water, clean air, a solid democracy — was currently toxic, unavailable, or going to hell.
I laughed, because it was funny, but also because it felt painfully true, and laughter is a good, if temporary, antidote to the dread we live with.
It used to be, or at least it used to feel as if, there would be one horrific event somewhere — a hurricane, an earthquake, a mass shooting — and everyone who wasn’t immediately affected would rally until someone else’s number inevitably came up in the Great Calamity Lottery.
But these days, we literally can’t catch our breath before the next crisis.
No sooner had the postapocalyptic haze lifted from the Canadian wildfires last week did a tanker truck carrying thousands of gallons of gasoline crash and burst into flames, taking out a chunk of I-95 and claiming the life of the truck’s 53-year-old driver.
The next day, as officials were still assessing the damage, 18,000 West Philly residents were urged to boil water before drinking after a pumping station failure. And that was after the entire city was plunged into a bottled-water-buying panic in March after some pollutants from a chemical plant made their way into the Delaware River.
See, if we were keeping a Dystopia Calendar, maybe we could have known it was Toxic Water Monday again.
Since 2020, we have had countless alarming moments that should have served as a reminder of how connected we are, how dependent we are on each other’s actions or inactions.
Instead, New York Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro said during an appearance on Fox News that he didn’t want to politicize the Canadian wildfire smoke by lecturing people about climate change. And Steve Milloy, a longtime lobbyist for the tobacco, coal, and oil industries, said on the same network that the Fanta-colored sky and heavy air was just harmless “soot.”
We have all learned so little these past few years, but I ended our apocalyptic week dialed into one of the many lessons from the wildfires: Never take a blue sky for granted. So I headed to the beach.
The attendant who sold me a beach pass on Asbury Park, N.J.’s boardwalk noted the bright sunshine, and then loudly declared that those Canadians had really screwed us over.
I suggested that New Jersey had its share of wildfires that affected communities beyond its borders, so maybe we were even, and she scoffed. American exceptionalism and arrogance never take a day off, I guess.
I’ll admit, of all the recent crises, the end-times skies and air-quality alerts hit hard. I wasn’t sure if it was the cumulative effects of three years of constant stress over a global pandemic, social unrest, and inflation, but I found myself shaken in a way I didn’t expect.
Even during the most confusing days of the pandemic, I took solace in being able to escape by going outdoors. The world was a scary mess, but the sky was still blue, the grass was still green, the birds were still chirping in a hopeful sign that not all was lost.
But then, during the wildfires, we were relegated back inside to stare out into a world many of us barely recognized. It wasn’t until I began seeing comments from people who drew comparisons between the smoke-filled wildfire skies and the smoke that poured from the World Trade Center after the 2001 terrorist attacks that I started to make the connection.
That awful September day, I was one of countless journalists who headed to lower Manhattan. I still remember walking toward the towers feeling the same sense of dystopian fear we’ve almost become accustomed to.
But it also reminded me of how differently we have treated all the tragedies that have followed, and how dangerous that inconsistency has become.
A terrorist attack claimed nearly 3,000 lives, and we resolved to fight terror and defend our democracy together. We memorialize the day and those we lost.
To date, more than a million Americans have died from COVID-19, and they continue to die by the thousands every day, but many can’t seem to try and distance themselves from the ongoing crisis fast enough.
On Tuesday, a former president who tried to topple our democracy was arraigned in federal court in Miami on 37 felony counts connected to alleged mishandling of classified documents, yet hundreds of Americans gathered to support him, and they’re lining up to put this twice-impeached, twice-indicted, insurrection-leading loser back in the White House.
And, as the news alerts on my phone kept reminding me before I turned away from it, there was much more. But for a few hours, I sat on a New Jersey beach, gulped in lungfuls of salt air, and stared at the big, beautiful blue sky.
As bad as things are guaranteed to be if we don’t get things right in this world, it’ll be more important than ever to pencil in some time for a little peace on those Dystopia Calendars of ours.