Since our friend Tropical Storm Edouard completely ruined my beach plans, I am left to sit here in my living room, complain about a blister, and ponder the human tendency to FREAK OUT. Good old Edouard has reminded me of another tropical acquaintance I once had, Hurricane Rita, circa 2005. Rita showed me what happens when the world freaks out. For those of you who may not be familiar with that yet, this is what happens: People wait in a 2 mile long line to get a tank of gas, pay $20 for bottled water, and wait in traffic moving at the pace of 2 feet/min. All in all, most of this turned out to be completely unnecessary. The hurricane proved not even strong enough to propel my brother’s skateboard-kite hybrid and all those who ended up stranded on I-45, with no gas, felt like suckers for missing a 6 day vacation. Granted, Hurricane Katrina had just happened so nerves were a little on edge, but then again New Orleans’ peripheral looks like a contact lens. So anyway, this left me with my first rule of freaking out:
Freaking out when a hurricane is coming and you live in a bowl: OK
Freaking out when a hurricane is coming and you live on a cookie sheet: not OK
Moving on to example 2 of the freak out instinct. This morning during my scholarly scour of the Houston Chronicle, I came across a peculiar showcase of human nature, “145 Die in Northern India During Stampede at Shrine.” My first thought: Whoa. I guess those cows aren’t so sacred after all. But upon further examination, I realized this was not a stampede of cows or other such quadrupeds, but of HUMANS. A HUMAN stampede killed 145 people. That’s 29 basketball teams, or 20 mini vans, or 5 classrooms of kids, or in other words a LOT of people. Apparently, a rumor quickly spread that there was a landslide so the Hindus visiting this shrine (located on a cliff) went completely berserk. People were pushed off the edge and/or trampled resulting in the deaths of mostly women and children. (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5922320.html or for a similar story see Alma 30:59) But in the end, the only avalanche was the one of panicked pilgrims trying to run away. It’s shocking to think this many people died because of . . . nothingness really. So here’s rule 2 of freaking out:
Freaking out when you may trample small Indian children: not OK
Freaking out when you may trample apostates named Korihor: OK
All this caused me to reflect on freaking out in my personal life. Apparently, it’s something I do often. However, I feel my occasional hyper ventilations are very often deserved (i.e. anytime I’ve had to go ice skating) and in the end, when I realize the problem was nowhere near as big as I made it to be, it was much easier to deal with (except for ice skating, that’s still a big problem). So I suppose hear is my final rule of freaking out:
Freaking out when it results in death, destruction, carnage, chaos, paranoia, etc: not OK
Freaking out when it results in anything else but the previously mentioned problems: OK!!!
Or at least in my personal, prone-to-freak-out, opinion :)
