🌋Alarm is appropriate, the volcano is erupting🔥

"Choking on the dirt and sand, Your former glories and all the stories..."

View of Pompeii, Francesco Piranesi, Etching (from The Met, Public Domain)

The shaming of people who care and are cautious is manipulative in nature.

People respond to crisis with alarm — which leads people to take appropriate actions. Humans are generally actually good about reacting appropriately to disasters — it’s the elites who succumb to what disaster researchers call “elite panic” and behave counter-productively, putting a higher priority on controlling people over controlling the problem.

There are countless stories of people escaping disasters and other calamities because they were “alarmists” — and also wrenching stories about people perishing because they did not or could not take timely action in a crisis.

The the story of Pompeii is riveting. One may be led to think initially that the people frozen in place by the volcano were merely caught unaware. But only about 2,000 people out of around 20,000 actually stayed behind in Pompeii to get pyroclasted into a grim posterity. The vast majority were alarmists who fled the city — in abject fear of the volcano… and escaped in time and therefore lived out the rest of their lives.

What led that minority to stay behind? Normalcy bias? Propaganda? I wonder if perhaps elites convinced some essential workers that they needed to stay behind and keep the economy going. Perhaps some felt they had no other good option and just hoped for the best. We will never know the exact stories. But we’re seeing ours play out. Somehow those people were convinced staying behind was okay.

What we don’t ask in retrospect, notice, is why did people flee? We know why and we understand they were right to do so. We also don’t ridicule them for having been scared into leaving Pompeii - possibly with fear mongering?

There are people with reasons to lie to us and to manipulate people, and they don’t care about our well-being. They simply want to keep the economic status quo, or are working on behalf of people who prioritize that. Butts in seats downtown for the economy or commercial real estate. Whatever be the case.

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Tweet says Main Street is Very simple. Do 3 things PSA campaigns that you won’t die if vaxxed. Remind people kids aren’t a risk. Remove masks everywhere so people don’t constantly live in fear. Voila. Roaring economy. Spending is about freedom from fear. Quote-tweet says There’s something to the Mad Men pilot and covid. Telling people they’re more likely to die in a car accident than covid doesn’t matter. Nor do vax stats. Happiness is freedom from fear, a billboard that screams whatever you’re doing is ok

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Those people have an agenda to stop people from reacting in a particular way — so they shame alarm like it’s something bad, because they know alarm works. So they harshly criticize the use of signals for alarm, as if they are bad, in an attempt to undermine this useful tactic that can lead to us helping each other — loving one another — in this disaster.

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This refers to sardonic art used for a random op-ed in an obscure publication. text says Let start right at the beginning even the image of the article is solely positioned to instill fear with its imagery

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Are fire alarms bad? Are ambulance sirens bad? All these things can “instill fear” quote unquote. How about the traffic videos you hear about people having to watch in classes when they’re at risk of losing their drivers license? How about the training for being at a nuclear power plant or working with welding or working with infectious diseases like ebola? Are those “fear mongering” or is that okay - when the danger is real?

The danger is real now. There’s no shortage of verifiable proof of risk.

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graphic by @laurenthemedium text says there are hundreds of news articles and it is a collage of long covid related headlines as follows. Mild cases of coronavirus may have serious long term and recurring effects. young people are experiencing serious symptoms. Even mild covid in young people often leads to long-term symptoms study finds. they had mild covid then their serious symptoms kicked in a new study illuminates. think a mild case of covid-19 doesn’t sound so bad? think again. Adrienne Matei. Study finds 1 in 10 healthcare workers with mild covid have lasting symptoms think mild covid-19 is no big deal? study finds increased risk of death six months later. Long covid can lead to kidney damage or failure even in milder cases new research suggests. report suggests some mildly symptomatic covid-19 patients endure serious long-term effects. Significant amount of Long-Haul covid sufferers had mild symptoms during initial infection. Mild cases of covid-19 could cause long term effects on the body and brain. New study shows long-term effects of covid even with mild cases. Think a mild case of covid-19 is no big deal? think again. New research shows concerning effects of the virus even in asymptomatic cases. 68 percent of patients with mild case of covid-19 get new diagnosis within 6 months CDC finds. Erica Carbajal Monday April 26th 2021. Many covid patients have new ailments months after recovering from mild cases, a CDC study finds. @LAURENTHEMEDIUM on INSTAGRAM

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Alarm is appropriate in a catastrophe. It’s what gets us to do the right things to solve problems and make things better. When the neighborhood is burning down, you don’t say shut off the sirens and let’s go into the burning house and calmly center ourselves in meditation among the flames. You put the fire out.

The billionaire Jeff Bezos, someone who can literally afford any security expert on earth, employs for his own safety, the guy who wrote a book praising fear and its usefulness to us as a survival signal. Makes you think, right?

And alarm just might be the only thing to work against normalcy bias - which is the unfortunate tendency in the human brain to believe things can’t change or won’t. People default to a normal because it’s easy, it becomes a default. A call to action with some fear can save people by alerting them with… an alarm!

But there are others who don’t want anybody taking precautions because they want them to keep doing the things they’ve always done so they don’t rock the boat, even as the boat sinks, or the cruise ship experiences an outbreak.

When I get the sense I’m being made to feel awkward, or shamed for taking precautions, or for speaking out for caution — I think of the molten bodies and how if it were me, my cohorts and I would be better off attempting to flee from that particular city before it’s dust — and flee SHAMELESSLY.

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Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace ("Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself.")

Reboot Foundation: Everything You Need to Know About Normalcy Bias (“We believed that the “normal” experience would overtake the abnormal one, and so we did not act, believing falsely that the return to normalcy would be swift. This was normalcy bias at work, and it is behind some of the most devastating tragedies in the human experience.”)

NBC News: Pompeii family's final hours reconstructed (“75 to 92 percent of the residents escaped the town at the first signs of the crisis”)

Sightseeing Tours Italy: Did anyone survive in Pompeii? (“Archaeologists have determined from past documents and artefacts that there were around 20,000 people living within the city at the time of the eruption. From studying the skeleton remains, they estimated that around 2,000 people died in the eruption.”)

The Met: View of Pompeii (Altra veduta della Stanza dove si preparava il Bogno Caldo . . . ) n.d. Francesco Piranesi Italian (Medium: Etching Classification: Prints)

Song Facts: Cities In Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees (“This song describes the fate of the city of Pompeii, buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.”)

Wikipedia: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin de Becker (“The book demonstrates how every individual should learn to trust the inherent "gift" of their gut instinct. By learning to recognize various warning signs and precursors…”)

Marked By Covid, Mark the Million on Instagram (“Each individual Covid-19 loss is almost unfathomable due to the overwhelming circumstances: a global pandemic, a divided nation, isolation amidst a facade of digital connection, lost mourning rituals, finger-pointing, disregard despite a constant national spotlight, and -- of course -- the completely preventable nature of this slow-moving disaster.”)

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