It is quite the fashion these days to be Eeyore. 

Eeyore, Pooh’s gloomy friend, would never fail to see the dark side of things.  Watching the news on television makes it easy to conclude we are all followed by a cloud o’ doom. 

My family and I went through an experience on October 15, 2006 that changed our view of news reports.  I apologize to those who have already heard this story but I think it bears repeating.

On that Sunday morning, we were on the Big Island of Hawaii when the Kona coast was hit with a 6.7 earthquake.  All four of us were born in San Diego and we were as used to earthquakes as most Southern Californians are but we had never been on top of the actual epicenter before. 

It makes a difference.

We knew to get in the doorway and no one was hurt or even too terribly shook up.  But after an earthquake of that magnitude, a little damage was to be expected.

The power returned after a short time and we turned on the television but we were only able to get one channel: Fox News. 

We never watch the Fox channel unless it is for football games or Sunday night programming: The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad.  The only time we had even seen clips from Fox News was when Jon Stewart ran them on The Daily Show while making rude comments or, my personal favorite, staring at the camera in open-mouthed disbelief.

According to Fox News, as a result of the earthquake, the Hawaiian Islands were going to disappear from the surface of the Earth.  Looters and rioters were surely running amok, panic ruled the streets and the foundations of civilization were crumbling before our very eyes.  The Antichrist had been seen with his entourage. 

We looked out the window and saw none of that.  Everyone seemed to be taking things in stride and there was no sea monster rising from the depths of the ocean preparing to eat us all.  We could not even see Russia from our hotel room. 

People were phoning into to Fox News with FIRSTHAND LIVE REPORTS FROM THE EARTHQUAKE ZONE but, much to the disappointment of the interviewers, were mostly calling to say they were okay.  One woman from Maui said, “A picture fell off the wall.”

The anchor asked in a breathless and excited manner, “What was the picture of?”

We all stopped what we were doing, looked at the television and each other and were in such a haze when the third aftershock rolled through, no one even flinched. 

We thought that if this was indeed the End Times, perhaps we should venture forth from the hotel room to be a witness to the spectacle. 

As we walked to the lagoon, we saw hotel personnel sweeping up debris and preparing lunch using generator power. 

I may not be a Biblical scholar but I am pretty sure the Revelation of John mentions nothing about Armageddon being tidy and catered. 

We all learned a valuable lesson: there are times when you need to turn off the television and go out there yourself in order to learn the truth. We find comfort in this and are all a little bit cynical now when we hear news reports of cataclysmic disaster.

The next day we drove to the airport (the roads were clear) and our plane took off without incident although we did get stuck at the Maui airport for four hours.  Now, some may say getting stuck in Maui for four hours wouldn’t be all that bad but you would be wrong.  The Maui airport is small, very small, and is only partly air-conditioned.  All of us who were stuck in between flights were crowded into the one cool area of the place and no one was the slightest bit festive.  Mainly because of the heat and delay but it didn’t really help much that there was also a young child who sustained a hissy fit for the entire time because the TSA had confiscated her jar of peanut butter. 

For the four hours we were there, she never paused long enough to inhale and over all; it was quite an impressive performance.  But we couldn’t help but wonder why the safety of our ride home depended on flying without a child’s jar of peanut butter.  I have trouble believing there is any mention whatsoever of a child’s jar of peanut butter anywhere in the Terrorists Manual (Jihad for Dummies.)  The perpetrators of the attacks of September 11, 2001 were a group of 19 hung-over twits armed only with box cutters who, as far as the news reports said, had not a single child’s jar of peanut butter between them.  Lord knows how much more damage they would have done if they had been in possession of a child’s jar of peanut butter.  We can only shudder in imagined horror. 

I know things are not going as well as they should and I can appreciate that.  But I’m not completely worried.

My home is protected by TWO jars of peanut butter.