From Pine View Farm

Water Main Down 1

The water main break in Boston is big news.

Indeed, calling it a “water main” seems an understatement; it was the primary aqueduct brining water to much of the Boston metropolitan area. The back-up water supply is not treated sufficiently to be drinkable, so residents must boil water for cooking and drinking.

They do not have to take their buckets and dip water out of Boston Harbor–which might well dissolve the average bucket–or lug it from a well to the house the way my Granddaddy did for many years.

Adrian Walker, whose own tap water was affected, suggests that the media reaction may have been overstated (emphasis added):

Now, I understand that this is a major inconvenience. Having to boil water is a pain. Mindless tasks like brushing teeth now take a little thought. Grocery stores were said to be running out of water. (Trust me, Poland Spring and its competitors will make sure the stores aren’t out for any length of time. This is their Super Bowl.) We’re in for a trying week.

But has panic become the new normal? A ferocious survival instinct was on display this weekend, even though this isn’t really a threat to survival. The psychology was familiar to anyone who watched the city shut down a few months ago for a blizzard that never came. It’s as though the capacity for distinguishing between a problem and a crisis has gone away.

He has a point. Panicking does not solve problems; it destroys thought and prevents solutions.

Demagoguing politicians and commentators prefer the language of panic–bombs! invasion! evil-doers! massive hordes! communist socialist fascism! brown people!–to create fear, leading to panic, leading to followers, leading to power.

Panic launches columns and speeches and rants that we’re not taking this, that, or the other seriously enough.

(We see this across the spectrum of American thought, but I believe, based on my own experience following news, that this tendency leans right.*)

Enough theses, thoses, and the others paralyzes action through panic overload.

I used to have a boss for whom the A Number One Priority was always the last executive to call him on the telly fone. He taught me this:

    When everything is a priority, you have no priorities.

Fortunately, the folks working to patch the hole decided their job was not to panic, but to solve a problem.

The hole is patched and water may start flowing again in as little as two more days.

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*Daily Kos–it is linked on the sidebar–to pick a well-know left-leaning forum, has its share of “end-of-the-world” diaries that appear via its right sidebar. Note that they are posted by members–anyone can register and post there until and unless they get banned for violating the rules of the site–not by the Front Pagers.

Nevertheless, the left has nothing to compare in numbers, vehemence, or audience to Rush Limbaugh or Cal Thomas or Charles Krauthammer and the like for sheer mouth-foaming the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh-ism.

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  1. Torpedo, Baby, Torpedo « From Pine View Farm

    May 4, 2010 at 10:13 am

    […] Provide an enemy about whom to panic (see my post from Monday on the rhetoric of panic). […]