While You Were Glued to Those CNN Updates, the World Kept Turning
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In the days following the attack of Sept. 11, a bridge collapsed in Texas and killed five people. A gathering hurricane dropped nearly a foot of rain on Florida. A tropical storm in Taiwan claimed at least 79 lives. A retired tire salesman in Kentucky became the world’s second recipient of a self-contained artificial heart, battery included. The NFL’s long, national lockout moved toward an end.
Few noticed. The world was consumed--understandably--with a single, devastating headline. But worlds turn. The everyday refuses to go gently. Bills pile up. Deadlines arrive. Stuff, as they say, happens.
This week, as the Texas woman who drowned her children quietly slipped back into the TV news, it became clear that, however unthinkably, healing was beginning. From the sidelines of a week in which all the top cable telecasts featured CNN replays of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, old news called out, “Remember me?”
Remember, for instance, the lewd-conduct charges against stand-up comedian Paula Poundstone? A day after the attack, she quietly pleaded no contest in Los Angeles to one count of felony child abuse. Her attorney said that “there may have been one camera” in the courtroom as she denied molesting her adoptive and foster children but apologized for her “alcohol problem.” This, after a media circus in which the paparazzi “literally [had been] stumbling and tripping” over each other at her every court appearance for months.
Remember that international flashpoint of yore, the World Trade Organization? Last week, while the public eye was fixed elsewhere, the final hurdles in China’s 15-year struggle to join were cleared away.
Remember Michael Jordan’s basketball comeback? Remember the USA Today/Gallup and Time/CNN polls this summer on whether he should limp back into professional sports or stay retired? The athlete was expected to announce his decision in mid-September. There has been no announcement, and “mid-September” will soon be gone.
It stands to reason, of course, that such matters would be eclipsed by last week’s disaster. For most of the last several decades, news--even bad news--has, for most Americans, been the narrative of a prosperous nation in peacetime: politics, money, celebrity gossip, trials of the century. The occasional eruption, human and otherwise, of nature. “Trends” that either didn’t exist or were, like all real change, mere increments in society’s slow, slow progress. Drama aimed at making small lives feel bigger. Until last week, there had been precious little in the headlines that felt truly urgent and real.
But real things have happened in the past week, including some that have affected public safety, and drawing attention to them has been “harder than usual,” says Frank Alsheimer, a lead forecaster for the National Weather Service in Florida. Alsheimer’s job last week was to monitor tropical storm Gabrielle, the worst storm to hit the state’s western coast in 33 years.
Gabrielle, which moved out into the Atlantic on Tuesday, blew the roofs off homes, flooded streets and forced massive power outages last week. When it hit, Alsheimer was in Ohio with family. Until he finally rented a car and drove to Florida, he said, he found himself glued, not to meteorological data, but to World Trade Center updates: “I was watching 55 minutes of national news and five minutes of the weather channel” for every hour at the TV.
The collapse of the Queen Isabella Causeway in Texas on Saturday was relegated to the back pages in most of the nation’s papers, though at least five people died when a tugboat and barges smashed into the bridge. The derailing of an Amtrak train in Utah on Thursday was mostly treated as a footnote to the World Trade Center fallout--the 263 frightened people on board who were not injured were mentioned predominantly because they included “stranded airline passengers.”
What could be said, Sept. 12 when, after four horrific plane crashes, a fifth went down in Yucatan in an unrelated accident, carrying 16 tourists from the Pacific Northwest? Or when, in the midst of a worldwide discussion of terrorism’s death toll, it was reported that 10 were dead in Taiwan and at least seven others were missing after tropical storm Nari?
When the contract dispute between the National Football League and its officials took an important step toward resolution Monday, it scarcely earned more than a handful of paragraphs. Before last week, such a development would have made headlines.
Then again, so would have the figurative victory lap of U.S. Open champion Venus Williams, who was making the talk-show circuit the day before the attack.
In this atmosphere, Californians could be forgiven for perhaps not noting that the Legislature had adjourned without a Southern California Edison bailout. Or that the California Highway Patrol is cracking down on unsafe truckers. Or that U.S. Rep. Gary Condit’s congressional district had been so reconfigured that any incumbent would have trouble there.
It seems an eternity since anyone mentioned the poor young woman no one could hear enough about this summer: Chandra Levy.
Remember her?
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Times staff writer Gina Piccalo contributed to this story.
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