Who doesn’t know a tale of a boy crying wolf?
When you feel like an ass...
It’s scary, pithy, seemingly transcends cultures — and at our mother’s knee, teaches us honesty, forethought, and bewaring of society’s patience with even the youngest of us being so spectacularly short, a child is forced to spend the night in the tree hiding from the hungry pack because either he’d been mistaken before, or, yes, even lied. Luckily for the edificational value of the piece, youth is given no weight as an extenuating circumstance.
Not that even if it was, it would have helped Gioacchino Giuliani make himself heard. A seismologist at a physics institute at Gran Sasso, near the badly-hit Italian city of L’Aquilae, Gioacchino is an adult — a justifiably incensed one.
A 6.3-magnitude quake hit L’Aquilae before dawn on April 6th and claimed over 275 victims. Said Giuiliani in a rather tasteless too-soon-post-quake interview, “There are people who must apologize to me, and they must have the weight of what occurred on their conscience.”
Considering there ought to be quite a bit of documented evidence of authorities having ignored your warning, Senor Giuliani, they will be sure to eat a flock of crows. But calling them on it when all those very countrymen you had been trying to protect are in need of reassurance and help, with dead being pulled out from under the rubble and thousands homeless throughout Central Italy, now, at this moment, is that an altogether good time?
Sure, there is a cause for being upset. Who wouldn’t be after their loudspeaker-equipped vans — seen driving around the area broadcasting Giuliani’s warning regarding an imminent quake he claimed to have predicted through his analysis of radon gas emissions — were reported to police for spreading false alarms and. He’d even been made to remove his findings from the Internet. “They called me an imbecile,” he said.
So, who is having the last laugh now?
Unfortunately, no one! Should the media have remembered to bring up his warning later, when the worst of the aftermath had already passed, it might have been entirely within his right to mention having been upset for having his predictions ignored. As it is now, both he and the authorities are looking like asses out of any sort of disguise, and it is the innocent victims who are bearing the cost.
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