Thoughts from Alex! “All Shook Up”
Posted under: All Shook Up
written on Wednesday, June 23, 2010.
I want us for a second to take a side bar with me to an issue that has been on my mind for, oh I’d say the last hour or so. Considering what my attention span is like you should take this to mean that it is something of real significance in our lives as present, or future, Torontotonians. At approximately 1:40 pm, Eastern Standard Time, Ontario and Quebec were struck by an earthquake for the the first time in over a decade. It registered as 5.0 on the richter scale with skyscrapers in T.O. being evacuated and the windows of City Hall in Ottawa shattering….. And I didn’t notice a thing.
My first clue came in the form of a mass onslaught of my newsfeed wall on facebook (this I think speaks loads to our generation. That a potentially lethal natural disaster could have occurred and the first thing we all decide to do about it is tweet or update before even checking on our grandmothers) that was alluding to what I thought at the time was just a really widespread inside joke. However after the 22nd status change in two minutes that simply said “EARTHQUAKE!” I realized that something must in fact be up. As the status updates continued to pour in, my favorite so far being “Earthquake causes Tsunami warnings for residents surrounding fake lake” (a fairly amusing jab at what I consider a political mess up on a very long list of G 20 mess ups), it suddenly dawned on me.
I missed it.
Now when people ask the inevitable “where were you when….” questions I will have no incredible anecdote about grabbing the fine china or even seeing unexplainable ripples forming in my glass of water…. I have nothing. What does that mean for my understanding of history? I can’t take part in an retelling or contribute in anyway. If it weren’t for facebook I would probably would have had no idea till I got home and would have just gone on about my daily business while everyone around me was in a state of reflection trying to understand themselves in correlation to this, quite literal, shifting of the planets. Am I missing out on some sort of awakening? Will my peers reach a state of enlightenment that I am robbed of simply because I am not very observant? These questions, and more, have been wracking my brain trying to come to some sort of conclusions on how to proceed in this post-quake world. Can I still have a place in it even if I am still living in what will now come to be known as the pre-quake world? I just don’t know…