vog and beliefs

More about vog.

We had a customer in the shop who told D that his fireman friends did air testing of the masses hanging over Kona and they are moisture, not vog. D had the presence to ask a most reasonable question, "If that's not vog, then why am I so grumpy?"

D got a resonable answer, too, "You're right, it must be vog."

But really, if it's not vog, what are these miserable physical symptoms about? What is the darkish haze we see right before our eyes? I like to think that the message got altered in being carried, and the air testers said, "It's mostly moisture." That I can understand to be true.

Who cares? Well, the volcanic gasses are not healthy. If a person can simply fall asleep and die in their car from gas fumes (don't worry, I understand that there are different gasses at work here), then at what point do we all just fall asleep on the island and never wake up? In fact, today is my day off and I'm thinking of just going back to sleep...

The "is it vog" question seems pretty silly to me. But I keep relating this back to some historic events that had people questioning what is real. The first is from a trip to Zimbabwe.

I was sitting at the camp with our camp manager, a woman, and I asked her how people felt about the AIDS problem and so many people dying from it. Her answer was, "They don't believe in it." Her friend dying in the hospital as we spoke went there with a really bad flu. What's to believe or not about AIDS? But it makes change unnecessary if we simply don't believe it.

The second is from my introspection regarding Nazi Germany. I was shocked to realize that many people had pre-indicators that they needed to get out of there. Some did. This begged the question of why others did not leave. I heard in my head all the reasons, "We can't afford to move; to where?; this is our home and all we own for generations is here; no one should be able to chase others away; something will change." and the most befuddling, "This isn't really happening."

Reports are greatly exaggerated. Sometimes. In Nazi Germany, they were not. With AIDS in Africa, they are not. With vog? Well, today is clear. No one is sounding sirens or planning evacuations here (that I know of). But other places on the island have already been evacuated and then repopulated, because, ultimately, we just don't know.