Oklahoma

This morning, Mike and Mike talked sports on ESPN Radio.  That’s usually no surprise.  But they weren’t talking sports on the morning of April 16, choosing instead to talk about the Boston Marathon bombing.  While that was marginally a sports story, that’s not the type of coverage they lent to the subject.

This morning, the news in DC tells us to expect up to 91 fatalities in Oklahoma after yesterday’s tornadoes, and half of those may be children.   And then it moves on to the next story, about the IRS or the Department of Justice or whichever scandal is having its turn.

This isn’t meant to compare events, or claim East Coast bias, or anything like that.  Realities like the tornadoes in Oklahoma are difficult for our head to process and almost impossible for our hearts to handle.  Events like the Boston bombing – and like September 11, or the shooting sprees in Newtown, Blacksburg, and Aurora – are, in a way, easier to deal with.  In those situations, there is a defined bad guy – a terrorist or a lunatic – so the pain can be focused as outrage and anger.  On one side is our concept of normalcy, on the other side are motives driven by evil.  Very simple.

But what motive does a tornado have?  Or a hurricane?  Or a meteor the size of Texas?

Ours is a dangerous world – a fact which makes our lives, and those around us, very fragile.