Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.
-Hodding Carter
I woke up the morning and tuned NPR News on the radio where I heard there had been a 6.6 earthquake in Hawaii yesterday morning. This was the first I had heard of this disaster and I was surprised by my reaction to it. First, I was relieved to learn that no one was seriously hurt. Second, I was surprised that I was not feeling any fear or anxiety the way I would if I had watched images of this event on television. Not seeing images of the destruction almost instantly after it happened and not seeing these images replayed again and again distanced me from the incident. It was still a shock but at the same time I did not feel I was in danger myself or that the world was in anyway more threatening or perilous because of something that had happened at a place roughly three thousand miles away from me.
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