Off to See the Wizard

Weather conditions were rainy and very windy all over the country a few days ago, producing a tornado in London. There were almost 100 MPH winds and it lasted about a minute, causing damage to several buildings on one street, removing one wall and injuring six people. Some people were displaced and made to stay elsewhere until the area was deemed safe enough for them to return, until someone repaired the damaged roofs and until the one family got another wall. It was all over all of the national and local radio stations, and there seemed to be a general feeling of panic and disbelief that such a tragic thing had happened. One radio reporter was in the area conveying the terrifying event to listeners, telling them about the cars that had been flipped on their sides and the bricks that were littering the street; at one point, I giggled.

It’s not that I find tornadoes funny, I don’t; they’re mean things that spring up out of no where and often pack so much deadly energy and force that entire towns are leveled and hundreds of lives shattered or lost, remnants of a previous existence scattered for miles. Who wants to live in an area called “Tornado Alley?” I sure as hell don’t! Christ… “Looks like tornado weather today… keep a lookout. I’ll pray you don’t get impaled by debris flying around at hundreds of miles per hour. Good luck!”

This is something we as Americans are generally accustomed to, though, because Americans have grown up with various types of natural disasters causing various levels of destruction, death and trauma, preparing us for the impact of hearing that New Orleans was wiped out by a Category 5 hurricane and that thousands of people were killed, or that a highly populated city in California was swallowed up by an earthquake, etc, etc. When a tornado like the one that occurred in London the other day happens somewhere in the US, it is seen as an annoyance and barely gets mentioned in the local evening news.

However, from what I could tell from the radio broadcasts the other day, if you’re not brought up living with it in your country, as something that is discussed and accepted as something that is going to happen and possibly affect you or someone you know, the concept of natural disasters is absolutely terrifying.

Apparently natural disasters are not something that the English are even remotely accustomed to dealing with. As it turns out, poisonous / dangerous animals and insects and natural disasters are not something that exist in England, and, in general, the people are not completely aware of and are afraid of those things. So, when a tornado (I learned that approximately 30-40 per year are normal, just not in populated areas) strikes and messes up some roof tops and houses and scatters some bricks around, even though no one was seriously injured or killed, people get all nervous and upset because it is highly unusual and may give the impression that the world is coming to an end.

England has no earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, sand storms, or threat from tsunamis, and tornadoes are small and far and few between; they have no frightening looking, big, scaly reptiles with teeth and the ability to swallow small children whole, nor are there deadly spiders or bugs or snakes or anything of the sort -- the most frightening critters they have lurking about here are foxes, and they’re pretty damn cute.

Thus, the English carry on, day after day, with no thought, not even in the most remote recesses of their minds, of even the possibility of an encounter at any point in time with any critter or natural occurrence that might possibly endanger their well being, leaving them with the tendency to describe a small, one minute long tornado producing 100 mile per hour winds as “something out of The Wizard of Oz.”