Even Stephen King took a break from working on his latest novel, Psychic Car Detective, to join the "fun."
That response, sadly, was also predictable. When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, a University of Tampa professor called it "karma" for the election because when your only knowledge of a place is vague memories of King of the Hill, you begin to think the population is literally cartoonish. Often these comments will be from people whose profiles brag about living somewhere that "believes in science," then lists their Enneagram type.Â
There are two factors at play here. First, we're not good at remembering how different life elsewhere can be. As someone who spends half the year ensconced in the kind of cold that Soviet dissidents used to be exiled to, I'll admit to gawking at news of Texans washing away snow with water. But I melt like the Wicked Witch of the West in the slightest humidity, and God help me if there's an earthquake. If an elephant escapes the zoo and destroys your neighbor's house, you don't mock him for lacking elephant insurance, and yet whenever a city lacks the infrastructure for tackling a rare problem, it's suddenly open season.