OK, it wasn’t the smallest earthquake in the world. 5.8? Definitely something to write home to mother about. If mother doesn’t live in California. If she does? Come on then. Get a life.
We in California have some experience with earthquakes. We could do a 5.8 standing on our heads. And have. It’s not an everyday occurrence. It’s also not something we spend days and days talking about on every media outlet available to us. We reserve that for something larger. Say above 6.5? That gets our attention. To folks on the East Coast, it was as if God was tapping them on the shoulder. And maybe he was.
But 5.8? C’mon. Get real.
One does hope for a happier outcome from this. Perhaps, now that God has tapped them on the shoulder and made them think about something other than the debt ceiling or the latest tax breaks for the very wealthy, maybe attention could be focused on things that might actually matter in people’s lives. Like, say, jobs. After all, somebody has to sweep up all that broken glass. And who knows would could come out of that?
Possibly it might at least make some of our elected leaders take their partisan blinders off and see the world as it really is. As the two dinosaurs of the Republican Party who declared the President’s policy in Libya a failure literally as it was coming to fruition. These are the same people who started a war in Iraq that has, to date, cost more than a trillion dollars, not to mention more than 4000 U.S. lives, and has produced little more than several warring factions far more interested in blowing each other up than they are in governing their country and providing for their people. The President got at least that in Libya for slightly more than a billion dollars, not a single pair of American boots on the ground and…wait for it…not one single American life lost.
But the Libya policy was a failure? And Iraq was a grand success? Maybe you guys need to be shaken by something more than a 5.8.
And then there are those R’s out on the campaign trail who can’t seem to find anything good about the President. Of course, they don’t seem to have many solutions to the problems the country’s facing either. One hopes that at least some of them felt the earthquake. Maybe it engendered more solutions to the nation’s ills than tax cuts for the rich (again!) and banning gay marriage.
We hope…but we aren’t holding our breath. Perhaps living with earthquakes as we do in California leads us to look a little more outside ourselves than our brethren farther east. But we do have the feeling that when some of these jokers look outside themselves…they seem themselves.
5.8, indeed. Grow up!
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