The Disaster Equation

(Time x Proximity)

Human Coefficient

=

Date Disaster Enters Lexicon

by Alecsandra Washburn

Nothing brings us together like a good catastrophe. The media bottlenecked around Katrina, 9/11, the Columbia disaster, the JFK assassination, and focused our nation’s attention on catastrophe, with just cause. Humans crave tragedy and heartbreak because they bring us to our emotional asymptotes. Disaster surprises us, tries our morals, and disrupts the banality of our daily routines. For humans, a species bred for conformity but thirsting for the exhilaration of divergence, catastrophes can be both horrifying and invigorating.

Ruth Woerner, a survivor of the San Francisco earthquake in 1919, said, “For several years after I wished that there would be another earthquake so that I could hear things smash again.” It’s a rather extreme example in an extreme situation, but

the message is clear. Having bit from the apple, we desire more fruit.

Disasters affecting all of us, humanity at large, are imprinted into our memories. Anything, whether its origins stem from Mother Nature or the human race, that brings thousands to their knees can fascinate for centuries (E.G, the bubonic plague). Calamities of blockbuster proportions become part of our metaphoric vocabulary. It was a failure of titanic proportions. Their project went as well as Chernobyl. She fell like the Berlin Wall. It blew up Hindenburg style. We use these words to convey distressed emotions. They’re our way to let everyone know something horrible is happening. But then there are the words we don’t use, disasters we don’t include in our cataclysmic lexicon. There are hundreds of disasters worthy of an allegorical epithet we consciously neglect. Example: My matzo balls are sinking like the bodies in the ninth ward. For those without a sadistic sense of humor, I bet you cringed reading that.

So then why is it socially permissible for us to joke about certain disasters, while others invite awkward stares from listeners? The difference lies in the numbers.

For a disaster to be indoctrinated into our vocabulary it must meet certain standards. Time, for one, is critical. A disaster that happened five years ago versus one that happened seventy-five years ago (Katrina versus the Hindenburg) will weigh on us in different ways. The more time between the disaster and the current date on the calendar, the more likely it is to be used as retort. Consider the plague and the holocaust. By the time the plague fled the continent, an estimated 100 million people died, reducing Europe’s population to 350 million. The holocaust only killed six million people. In number alone, the death toll for the plague is much more staggering. However, the plague took place over 400 years ago and the holocaust was only 70 years ago. You can joke about the plague, but you can’t walk into your friend’s kitchen and say, “It’s hotter than an Auschwitz oven in here.” Age of occurrence is critical. Let’s call this the time variable.

Keeping this in mind, it should be noted that the time variable is directly affected by the proximity constant. The JFK assassination happened 50 years ago, Chernobyl was only 25 years ago. More people died in consequence of the Russian

nuclear explosion. Malformed children in surrounding areas are born even today. But Chernobyl went down in the nation of our Cold War adversary. JFK was an American president killed on American soil. Where a catastrophe occurs influences

how quickly we add it to our list of disaster terms.

This could explain our reaction to two recent earthquakes. Before the earthquake in Haiti, there was an earthquake in the Qinghai province of China. The Chinese earthquake killed thousands, most famously thousands of school children. In a nation with a one-child-per-family policy, losing a child is tantamount to losing your entire family lineage. In Haiti the death toll wasn’t nearly so staggering. But after the Haitian earthquake there was a call to action. Celebrity phone-a-thons, adverts from the White House, volunteers rushing to the airports, everyone felt the need to help Haiti rebuild. Not so after China. Yes, it was a disaster. And yes, we felt bad for them. But no one sent care packages. This isn’t just because China is a competing super power; it may be just because China is farther away than Haiti.

But none of these determine when words become metaphors for disaster so much as the human coefficient. Overall human death toll is the one thing that most shapes our disaster vocabularies. And not just the numbers of dead souls, but also

whom those people were. Think about Titanic. Thousands of people died, but the mass majority of the dead were immigrants, blue-collar workers. Those with money and power, the writers, artists, shapers of culture survived. Francis Patrick Mary Browne, a passenger aboard the R.M.S. Titanic, is a photographer best known for his photos of the vessel just before it sank. Margaret Brown was a famous millionaire aboard the Titanic, and the only woman to row a lifeboat to safety. Both Browne and Brown are iconic passengers of the R.M.S. catastrophe, both were somewhat rich and famous, and both survived. Browne went on to become and even more famous photographer and Brown became a revolutionary in the women’s rights movement. Those nameless hundreds who sank with the ship were the second and third class passengers. And the phrase “it sank like the titanic” has been around for a while. This makes the human coefficient two parts. It is combination number of people dead divided by number of famous people dead plus one [losers/(famous+1)].

So next time a plane runs through a building or Vesuvius erupts again, crunch the numbers and change up your time variable. There is a point, whether weeks or years later, when disasters become jokes and insults. See if you can figure out when

it will be acceptable to say, “The kid fell down like the Twin Towers”.

According to my predictions, that sentence should be acceptable around 2110.