Flashbulb Moments

There are personal, national and global events that sear themselves into our memory. Some involve immediate personal safety. Some involve a shock to our sense of normality. Some involve a threat to global peace. The greatest of them – the flashbulb moments – force us to remember where we were when we experienced them.

I’ve been through a tornado event here in Texas. The thunderstorm wall cloud was greenish black and towered over my neighborhood. It was eerily silent. A town just north of my town was being obliterated by a class 5 tornado, leaving slabs where houses used to stand, and sucking pavement off the streets. Then the sirens sounded, it got even darker and the funnels dropped out of the clouds in my town. Folks near me were hit. Not me. But I can never forget the dread – and the awe.

I live in a relatively safe place. So a tornado, a real tornado, can not be forgotten.

Yet, here I am. Not a survivor, exactly, because I was not hit. Not guilty, either, because the event was not of my doing. Still, I have to process the meaning of the disaster to me. In the case of a tornado, there is little sense to make of it or purpose to ascribe to it. But the value of it has come out of the aftermath – the wider community has come together to rebuild.

What flashbulb moments have you experienced? And what effects have they had on you?

Were you alive when President John Kennedy was assassinated? When his brother Robert Kennedy was assassinated? When Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated?

Were you a fan of the US space program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded? It was not just the first shuttle disaster, but the loss of the first teacher in space.

If you are really old you might remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world teetered on the edge of nuclear war. Do you remember Kennedy’s speech?

Depending on your age your might remember Three Mile Island, Chernoble and Fukashima. Nuclear disasters that scared us all. TMI was a bust – but it made made a great premise for a movie. Chernobyl remains a wasteland and its output irradiated crops and cattle across Europe. Fukashima has spewed its waste across the Pacific.

Perhaps you remember the first World Trade Center bombing. The blind sheik never gave up and we eventually got the destruction of the twin towers. We were all riveted to our TVs.

This week we have the Ethiopan airplane crash and the New Zealand mosque massacres. The airplane crash involved many more people. But the massacre matters more.

An airplane crash is more like a tornado. A freak of nature.

A massacre is an obscenity. A flashbulb moment. Not to be forgotten.

I hope there are fewer such moments in the future.