"Goodnight Irene..."

Today's quote is from a very old movie that my parents used to quote. I'm not sure which one because they never could remember the names of movies and Google wasn't invented yet. As a matter of fact, one of the best things about Google, is that you can be talking about a movie (or whatever) and if you can't remember something about it, you can Google it, but I digress.

If you turn on the TV, all any station is talking about is Hurricane Irene. You'd think that the end of the world was coming, and maybe it is... I DO remember before Hurricane Katrina, that they kept saying for residents in the path to evacuate but very few left New Orleans. And maybe that's why all of the alarm for this one... and make no mistake, there IS a lot of alarm. I don't know... It just seems like everything over the past few years is always a crisis. (You know, like when Rahm Emanuel said he didn't want to waste the opportunity of a crisis?) We've had so many financial crisis' and now weather crisis,' that everyone is numb to it all. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" Tarp. Stimulus. Another stimulus. blah. blah. blah... I was tempted to come home from work today and watch TV for the "reality TV" of Hurricane Irene. Our own horror movie but for real. The one where someone from every station in the U.S. will be manned on some dock in North Carolina and see waves crashing over it. We've become a nation of voyeurs. We can watch sex tapes or even sex live on some of these webcam sites (which I do not do and think is horrendous but my high schooler says all the kids her age know about these.) We have cameras set up all over the world on Earth Cam and others, for example. We've got reality TV, which is scripted, but real enough to make a man commit suicide. And almost everyone under the age of 60 has a camera and video on their phone, so nothing is missed anywhere. That's a problem, because we're all getting jaded. Very jaded. But this Pandora's Box has been opened and there is no closing it.

I'm going to go see where Irene is now...