Barry Farber
Monday, Jan. 3, 2005

I asked Bert what rubbernecking was. After an involuntary wince at my ignorance, he patiently explained that rubbernecking was all the motorists slowing down so they could get a better look at the smashed-up cars.

That brief exchange taught me not one but TWO things. I learned what rubbernecking was. And I learned that I’m not like the others on this planet. When I pass an accident, I keep looking straight ahead. I don’t WANT to see what the others are apparently willing to rubberneck for.

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  The earthquake-tsunami turned us all into a world of rubberneckers. The waves, at least the ones we saw thanks to amateur photographers with more nerve than they should have had at the moment, would have been angrily rejected by a Hollywood director of a disaster movie. The waves weren’t big enough. In the shot from the hotel room that was most replayed on TV in the first few days it looked more like an overflowing bathtub than a killer wave. Where was that dreaded 60-foot-high wall of water?

It wouldn’t have done for a horror film. It was just right, however, for the worst human disaster of modern times; perhaps of ALL time.

This was the devastation that kept right on devastating – long after the devastations we’re accustomed to having quieted down so news folks and columnists can get a grip on them now that they’re “over.” On Sunday, December 26, when the initial news broke, the report cited 8,000 dead. Terrible! Nothing further required. Unthinkable, right there. One fully expected later reports to tell us relief efforts were under way and, fortunately, there were not as many casualties as originally reported.

Alas, not this time!

By Thursday the number of dead alone had shot up deep into six digits. The injured many times that. The homeless incalculable. Those likely to die waiting for the coordination of international relief efforts likewise uncountable. What do commentators say when our strongest words can’t even begin to touch the smallest aspects of the ever-worsening catastrophe?

Lost in the benumbing coverage was an interesting survival tip. We already knew you shouldn’t strike a match to look for a gas leak. We already knew you shouldn’t touch the sparking and sputtering end of an electrical wire.

Somebody told us around day three or four that, if you’re standing on a beach and the water suddenly seems to get sucked dramatically OUT, away from the shoreline, you don’t stand there and say, “WowEE! Look at THAT!” Neither do you run back to the hotel and grab your camcorder and your friends and hustle them on down to watch the strange phenomenon.

The water’s strange retreat is the tsunami giving you your first and final warning. At that point you should turn around and run as fast as you can to higher ground. Even the natives of those Asian beaches didn’t seem to know any of that. They, just like the Western tourists, went and got their friends to come look at this freaky behavior of the tide.

How many lives might have been saved if that knowledge were as universally known as how not to look for a gas leak?

This Bush voter wishes the president had interrupted his vacation and flown from Crawford, Texas, to Washington to be seen unsmilingly immersing himself in the calamity. That’s the kind of thing Bush ENEMIES usually say – not Bush voters.

Bush voters usually say: “Why surrender to appearances? The president can’t do anything for the victims in Washington that he couldn’t do in Texas.” And that’s true. But look how many relationships break up when, even though she’s LISTENING to all of his brilliant comments, she’s looking the other way.

In Sweden they’re infuriated by their foreign minister, who went to the THEATER as word was arriving in Stockholm that 1,500 Swedes were missing in the tsunamis. She explained to her aide that she’d bought the tickets a long time ago. The aide said: “Sure, go ahead. I’ll send you a text message if anything new comes up!”

America understands the first President Bush looking at his watch during a debate with Bill Clinton. Sweden is about to understand going to the theater when you’re the foreign minister and 1,500 of your countrymen are missing on foreign shores. Proportionate to population, that would be like FIFTY THOUSAND Americans missing. Enjoy the play!

Early in my courtship I almost wrecked my chances for the marriage I wanted. We were at an antique auction in upstate New York. I saw some doodads I liked and raised my hand to ask a question. My action was taken as a bid. There were no further bids.

Turns out we didn’t want the doodads, but my chosen life partner, a resident of that small community, had to extricate me from that embarrassment as though I were a junior high school student caught with his hand stuck in the glove compartment of the school principal’s car while trying to stink-bomb it.

We were extricated only after the auction director chided me rather loudly, saying: “This is an AUCTION, sir. Not a press conference!”

Now it’s my turn to chide our top leaders for coming up with the cosmically stupid announcement the day after the disaster began that America would contribute a paltry 15 MILLION DOLLARS to the relief effort. The ensuing outcry forced us to increase that figure to $35 million, then quickly to $350 million.

No matter how high our offer would have gone, it would have been drowned out by the boos of a watching world correctly diagnosing our nervous increases as not a sober determination to meet an increasingly expanding disaster, but as a spray-deodorant against our initial lowball.

And the crime there is that no country in history has chased fire engines around the world as consistently and generously as the United States of America.

Who’s the jerk who piped up with the original $15 million? When you find him, label him "unskilled labor." There’s no need to quote a dollar figure in the first place. A simple statement from the secretary of state would have done: "We have no way yet of knowing how much might eventually be needed. America is taking a leadership role in organizing this effort and, whatever it takes, we’ll be in for the long haul."

Has anybody got the guts, the shoe leather and the cushioning in the seat-of-the-pants region to go back and see how many countries have lived up to their proudly proclaimed public promises to aid victims of war, famine, storm, genocide, etc.? There’s a chance I’d wind up sorry I’d asked. America might come off as a deadbeat dad itself now and then. I’ll take my chances. It’s an important question.

Cousin Jo called and told us her brother Michael’s son Stevie was in Phuket, Thailand, when the waves hit. He made it. And mercifully, no waiting. We learned he’d made it simultaneously with learning he’d been there. That makes my Cousin Michael, I think, the only person in the world to have a child survive 9/11 AND the earthquake and tsunami. His daughter Claudia was in the World Trade Center when the planes hit.

For some reason that distinction does not make me want to call friends and say, “Hey! Guess what!”

I’m too busy praying for the dead. And the living. And marveling at the cocoon of Divine Protection we’re still allowed to imagine surrounds us here in the United States.

And rubbernecking, except when the newscaster warns that certain of the images in the following dispatch are highly disturbing.

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