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Flee to the hills!
Sep. 19th, 2005 07:19 pmI spent the weekend in TO with Ms. Carotte and we attended her parent's church in Woodbridge. Once again, I disagreed with most of what the pastor had to say during his sermon (grumbling to myself all the while), but there was one particular part where I really wanted to jump up.
The pastor was illustrating a point about believing in the right God and making a decision on what to believe (instead of believing in everything). He then spoke of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and of the foolish people who stayed in their homes, watching the floodwaters rise higher and higher, until they were forced to move to their rooftops. He was half-laughing as he wondered aloud why they stubbornly refused to leave their homes, despite the danger. The people around me nodded, smiling and shaking their heads at the insanity of it all.
After having lived through the ice storm, I can completely understand how people can want to hunker down in their homes, wanting to wait out the disaster. I had visited the congress centre and I had no desire to live in a large room with hundreds of others, no privacy, no safety, and lots of noise. If I could suffer through that natural disaster, then I was going to suffer through it in the comforts of my own home. It may seem like an illogical conclusion, but when faced with a natural threat, most people will think they can face it.
Before Katrina arrived, I'm sure folks thought it would be some wind, some rain, a few uprooted trees, a few flooded basements, and that's all. No need to leave their homes completely unprotected from looters for that! Even when the tsunami approached the beaches of Indonesia, people stood with their feet in the sand watching it come in, unaware of the danger they were in.
I'm sure if the people in that Torontonian community were told that, next Thursday, Toronto was at risk of becoming a target for meteorites and that they should leave the city for their own safety, a good chunk of those people would not pencil it in to their schedules, much less abandon their homes for a sudden visit to Montreal. They would surely stay in their homes, umbrellas open, reading the Globe and Mail.
Okay, so maybe asteroids sound outlandish (although it isn't really), but do you really think Torontonians would evacuate their city because of reports of severe weather?
The pastor was illustrating a point about believing in the right God and making a decision on what to believe (instead of believing in everything). He then spoke of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and of the foolish people who stayed in their homes, watching the floodwaters rise higher and higher, until they were forced to move to their rooftops. He was half-laughing as he wondered aloud why they stubbornly refused to leave their homes, despite the danger. The people around me nodded, smiling and shaking their heads at the insanity of it all.
After having lived through the ice storm, I can completely understand how people can want to hunker down in their homes, wanting to wait out the disaster. I had visited the congress centre and I had no desire to live in a large room with hundreds of others, no privacy, no safety, and lots of noise. If I could suffer through that natural disaster, then I was going to suffer through it in the comforts of my own home. It may seem like an illogical conclusion, but when faced with a natural threat, most people will think they can face it.
Before Katrina arrived, I'm sure folks thought it would be some wind, some rain, a few uprooted trees, a few flooded basements, and that's all. No need to leave their homes completely unprotected from looters for that! Even when the tsunami approached the beaches of Indonesia, people stood with their feet in the sand watching it come in, unaware of the danger they were in.
I'm sure if the people in that Torontonian community were told that, next Thursday, Toronto was at risk of becoming a target for meteorites and that they should leave the city for their own safety, a good chunk of those people would not pencil it in to their schedules, much less abandon their homes for a sudden visit to Montreal. They would surely stay in their homes, umbrellas open, reading the Globe and Mail.
Okay, so maybe asteroids sound outlandish (although it isn't really), but do you really think Torontonians would evacuate their city because of reports of severe weather?
