by Garrison Frost

A little more than a month ago, those living in the more expensive South Bay ZIP codes woke up to find out that there had been a very real possibility of their obliteration the night before. The good news was that they hadn't been obliterated.

If not for the tsunami disaster in Indonesia that killed thousands of unsuspecting people last December, South Bay residents probably would have laughed at the notion that they had anything to fear from a tsunami. As it was, all they did was yawn. Even the local public safety officials charged with responding to such natural disasters reacted with something other than urgency on June 15 when they received word that – thanks to a 7.0 earthquake off Crescent City, California – a tidal wave warning was in effect up and down the coast. Their official explanations for not making a bigger deal of the tsunami warnings they received varied from technical difficulties to lack of training to bad timing. But really, the obvious reason they didn't reach for the Red Phone was that they just couldn't imagine anything like that happening here: "Dude, this is the South Bay. Ain't gonna be no tsunami."

Fortunately, they were right. There was no tidal wave after all, and after the Thursday editions of the local weeklies came and went, there wasn't much more thought of it. But that's not to say that tides weren't on our minds. In fact, we haven't been able to get our minds off the red tide that began swamping South Bay beaches in late June and apparently still hasn't dissipated completely. Even now the red tide is the talk of the town. First there were those sad stories of the seals getting zapped by the toxins, then the explanations about how it was safe for humans, then the complaints about how it might hurt the tourist industry. The news keeps coming on this red tide. Why talk about our nonexistent disaster warning system when, Jeez Louise, there's that awful smell?

Really, as stories go, the red tide is much more our speed than widespread death and destruction anyway. Sure, we're not without our problems in the South Bay, but on the whole we're much better suited to nuisance stories than catastrophe stories. Desirable, upscale communities cannot be defined as such if very bad things regularly happen there. However, part of thinking highly of one's own community is the perception that it is constantly being besieged by an assortment of minor threats to the wonderful status quo. It's for this reason that the South Bay will positively obsess over new condos, temporary construction noise and parking tickets while paying only passive attention to bigger things. Truth is we're not trained to see the really bad things that threaten everything – we're only trained to mistake the mildly bad things for them.

In my years as a newspaper editor in the South Bay, I experienced more than my share of real estate brokers and developers complaining of our coverage of bad news. One even went so far as to tell me that it was my job to "only talk about the good things, to help him sell homes." So, there will always be those who believe that the South Bay's positive myopia is the product of some kind of conspiracy, and there are plenty of civic boosters, government officials and newspaper publisher out there who seem to think that they need to manipulate the process. But in truth, they're the ones being manipulated. The newspapers and our elected officials aren't telling us what to think; no, it's the other way around. We don't want anything to happen here, so we've convinced ourselves that nothing ever does. And, after all, it was the red tide – and not the tidal wave – that got us after all.

(July 13, 2005)

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