For Wilshire Baptist Church
Remember the house explosion in Plano? Or the condo building collapse in Florida? And what about that deadly pet cobra that slithered into hiding in Grand Prairie? Oh, and the children in cages on the Texas border? What happened to all these news stories that had us spellbound, captivated or outraged?
What happened is that we — and the media that feeds us — have moved on. Like we always do. Something happens and we are interested or excited about it but then we quickly jump to the next thing that pops up and we leave behind us a trail of unfinished stories. COVID-19 continues to be front of mind because the information changes daily, but it will fade from view someday — that’s certainly our hope and prayer. After all, that’s what happened with the Spanish Flu of 1918, but we so thoroughly scrubbed it from our societal memory that we were caught off guard when COVID-19 arrived. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to forget.
Afghanistan and Hurricane Ida have been front and center in recent days, but they’ll get tossed aside soon enough just like Hurricane Harvey four years ago, which caused $125 billion in damage on the Texas Coast. A month or so ago we were hearing about the annual wildfires in California, but they quickly got pushed aside by other news.
Nowhere is the trend for short memories more rampant than in politics, where “bombshells” are dropped daily that are projected to turn the world upside down but usually fizzle faster than a July 4th sparkler. I could go down the list on both sides of the political aisle and there’d be plenty of embarrassment to go around.
Are we really that superficial and forgetful? Or just plain callous? No, I don’t think so. I contend that the increase in the volume of news and information we receive has shortened our attention spans considerably. Certainly, if we or a loved one are in the middle of one of these events — a fire, a hurricane, a deployment in the Middle East — we don’t forget until there is relief or resolution. And even then, we probably will never forget if the event has left us changed forever.
It’s been said that “all politics is local,” and that could be said of disasters too, except that nowadays a disaster far away can become local. When I was a teen, our church adopted a refugee family from war-torn Vietnam. We have friends and neighbors who came to North Texas to escape Hurricane Katrina and never went back to New Orleans. And today our North Texas communities are taking in immigrants from Central America and refugees from Afghanistan. Their disasters have become ours to some extent, and well they should if we have the love for others that we profess to have.
We may groan about having to wear masks to football games or church, but other stories are still being lived out even though we and the media have moved on. The deadly cobra is still on the loose in Grand Prairie. The exact cause of the house explosion in Plano has not been reported, but the occupant is still hospitalized and that neighborhood is still rebuilding. The rubble from the condo tower in Florida has been hauled away while engineers continue to ascertain the cause and assess the safety of other buildings nearby. Immigration remains a daily trial for those who live and work on the border.