Did your heart jump when that emergency phone alert went off recently? Mine certainly did.
It is a jarring, unnatural sound. And honestly, when you are already walking around with a full cup. I've been worrying about the cost of living, feeling the strain of work, and just sensing that the world is moving a bit too fast right now. A sudden, blaring alarm, when I'm working unpaid overtime in a complex and difficult job, was the last thing my nervous system needed.
It makes complete sense that we were all startled.
But what happened after the alarm stopped ringing is what I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
The message about the wildfires arrived on my phone in Welsh first. The English version followed mere minutes later. In my house, it was exactly three minutes. Yet, within hours, the internet was on fire. People were furious. Rumors were flying around that English-speakers were being robbed of "ten vital minutes" to find shelter from an imagined nuclear blast.
How did a clunky, three-minute delay on a government text message turn into a conversation about the end of the world?
I think it is because we are all incredibly tired, and we are all carrying around old bruises.
When you live in Wales, history is never really in the past. The past is built into the landscape around us. We live in the shadows of massive stone castles that were built centuries ago not for beauty, but to police and control the people living here. We carry the memory of things like the Welsh Not. This was the heavy wooden board hung around the necks of Victorian schoolchildren to shame them and punish them for speaking their own mother tongue. Not a myth, an unbelievable reality from our shared past.
That kind of history leaves a mark on a community. It creates a deep, lingering feeling that your culture is fragile and has to be fiercely protected. I feel it myself. Growing up in South Wales, my wife and I weren't even given the option to learn Welsh in our schools. The laws of the time simply didn't protect it.
So, when half the community sees modern political groups dismissing our language, they react from a place of deep, protective loss. And when the other half of the community feels completely alienated by a language they were never taught, getting an emergency alert they can’t read triggers a profound, terrifying feeling of being left behind.
Both sides are reacting to different kinds of loss. Both sides are just trying to feel safe in a shifting landscape.
But here is the question we need to start asking ourselves. "Who is benefiting from all this panic?"
There are voices out there right now. The political campaigns, social media algorithms, loud headlines, all thrive on our exhaustion. They know that when we are scared, we stop thinking clearly. They take a technical, procedural fumble by a government IT system and deliberately frame it as a personal attack on your freedom.
They want us to stay in a state of high alert. Because if we are busy arguing with our neighbors over a three-minute text delay, we are far too distracted to notice that the people winding us up aren't actually offering any real solutions to our problems. Our very real fatigue is being harvested to keep us angry at each other.
So, how do we step out of the noise?
Whenever I walk through the old, abandoned industrial sites scattered across our valleys, I try to pay attention to how the landscape handles disruption. When a massive slate quarry is abandoned, or a stone building falls into ruin, nature doesn't panic. It doesn't fight the stone. It simply pauses, finds the new cracks, and begins to grow differently. It adapts, and over time, it transforms the ruin into something deeply resilient.
We can do that, too. We don't have to keep fighting the stone.
The next time an alarm bells rings; whether it is a literal text message or a political headline designed to make your blood pressure spike... we need to remember, just take a breath. Acknowledge the noise, but don't let it rush you. Step back and ask yourself "Who wants me to be angry right now, and what are they trying to distract me from?"
If we can replace our panic with a little bit of curiosity, we stop playing their game. And we can start figuring out how to grow through the cracks, together.