When I was a kid, working at small-town radio stations in North Dakota, my favorite part of the job was working during tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which seems counterintuitive, perhaps – but there was something about the crackle and buzz of imporance, of purpose<\/em>, in the air; the increasingly urgent National Weather service bulletins, the terse phone calls from the cops and sherif, that far more than overcame the whole “there’s a tornado coming<\/em>!” thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And as a tall, gawky, greasy-haired, uncoordinated kid with little apparent athletic talent in a town that idolized the basketball team, it didn’t hurt that I knew, all over town, people were listeni<\/em>ng. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, when the warning was over, I and the rest of Stutsman and Foster Counties went back to normal life. I didn’t keep telling people to stay in their basements when the front had passed and the warning was over. Because much as I enjoyed knowing that people were paying attention (and, more important, that I could deliver what they were tuning in for, with style), there were other things in life, and I didn’t need the state of crisis to keep giving me value. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of people out there today can’t say that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Covid has brought out a strain in a small, but socially prominent, group of people that find their self-worth in crying “Crisis!”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not just the media – it’s a given that they will make hay out of crises; pandemics and riots make them more relevant, just as tornados made Mitch Berg’s patter more important to more people than the usual diet of local sports and Rupert Holmes records that occupied most of my time on those stations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n No – it’s regular, workadaddy, hugamommy, usually but not always left-of-center types, for whom being the harbinger <\/em>brings meaning to life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And it’s to them that so much of Big Public Health’s narrative is aimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Great Twitter thread on the subject:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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