On January 7, I woke up with an accelerated heart rate because of something that hadn’t happened in almost thirty years: a stress dream about a nuclear attack. I dreamed I was at Disney World, there was an impending nuclear attack, I couldn’t find my ID or my phone, and didn’t know what to do other than wake up with my chest pounding and take a couple of really deep breaths before cursing out sixty-three million assholes and rolling over.
Six days later, we’re walking down the sidewalk on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki Beach when the phones start making that Emergency Broadcast System noise. Both phones showed the same message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
So there you have it. The nightmare of your entire lifetime for every Gen-X kid who grew up on The Day After and Sting’s “Russians” and knowing you could be wiped out with the click of a button. Here we go. What happens now?
Maybe it was because of the dream, or maybe it’s because I lived through the surreality of working in Washington DC on September 11, but something about it just didn’t feel right. Everything was mostly focused on “okay what is next” and my mind never wandered for more than a couple of seconds to things like “I hope the people who promised to cuss out my mother if this happens come through” and “you know, even if we survive we’re probably never going to leave this island”. It was more like “okay, go in this hotel. They don’t have a basement. OK, let’s get back to our own hotel, that’s where our meds and phone chargers are.” And all the while, “need more data. Need more data.”
Because Hawaii’s a big place. Yeah, Honolulu is probably the A target, but maybe not, and can we narrow down where the thing is? Are we talking multiple warheads? (Probably not, I doubt DPRK could build a proper MIRV-based ballistic missile.) What are the odds the thing can hit what it aims for? More to the point, why are all four local network affiliates still running normal programming and why isn’t this on any of the cable networks yet? Even if CNN is late to the party, the local stations should be breaking in at least as much as they do in Alabama for a tornado warning, if not more.
And in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about Stanislav Petrov saving the world from a false alarm in 1983. Or all the stories about a weather balloon or a goose or the rising moon being taken for a missile. And you’re at a point in your life where you don’t trust anything you hear from anyone about anything except for when your wife says she loves you; everything else needs a minimum of two witnesses. And you just sort of decide that until you see a bang and a flash, you’re going to keep on living and see what happens. Make them bury you; don’t do it for them.
And then Tulsi Gabbard tweets out “false alarm”, and because of the above paragraph, you wait for someone else who’s maybe a little less cuckoo, and then the Hawaii EMA office tweets out “false alarm”, and then it’s a crawl on Everton-Spurs, and you can relax and exhale for a minute and then maybe the panic seeps out just for a second where you had it in a subconscious headlock before.
And you add it to the list, with the tornado near-misses and the September 11 attacks and the DC snipers and the quakes and the wildfires and the mudslides, and you start to think that maybe it’s just you. But that picture of you holding up the local paper with the huge “OOPS” headline? That’s definitely going on the Christmas card this year.