WE ARE READY TO DEAL WITH EARTHQUAKES TERRORISTS, CONGRESS, ANTHRAX ARE KEEPING US A LITTLE BUSY.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I think it's time we dropped a note to Saint Agatha of Catania. She is the patron saint of earthquakes; we have so many tremors around here that she ought to be on the city seal.

We may need her help. Four minutes before midnight on Halloween the Palm Springs 911 line was swamped by callers who worried that they had felt an exploding terrorist bomb. They were relieved to learn it was just a 5.1 earthquake.

I know how they felt. The recent 3.7 lithic adjustment under Compton and those small-change temblors under Beverly Hills last month got me almost nostalgic for concerns about a big one on the Newport fault or the Los Feliz fault or the San Andreas fault, or one of the other umpteen-million faults underneath Los Angeles.

I checked out my earthquake tool kit to make sure it still contained a flashlight, a radio, gloves and a big wrench to shut off the gas if need be. I put this kit together when I first moved to California and although I've never used it, it's been a comfort to me. Having survived two decades of ground shaking I now keep the kit in my bathroom, because that's the first place I go after my house stops moving.

But my preparedness was probably just wishful thinking. It's humbling having so many faults, but those who live in Southern California know what to do in an earthquake.

Then, on top of the shifting ground, it rained on Tuesday. In most of the world, rampaging nature would be considered normal - but in Los Angeles rain in October is definitely abnormal, and it caused those with their eyes glued to the anthrax headlines to look skyward with hope.

The arrival of El Nino would be a blessed event. Floods are another disaster we can deal with. It's the other kind that's making us crazy.

I'm nervous. I'm not sleeping well. I can't concentrate for very long. People's names have slipped out of my mind, and double negatives have crept into my speech.

I get angry easily. I am furious over the lack of military progress in Afghanistan, at the cavalier treatment of postal workers by the government and at the success of the New York Yankees.

The stupidity in Congress has, for me, passed from a minor amusement to an infuriating annoyance. I want something to go right, and I want it to go right, right now.

During my few rational moments I have recognized the parallels between today and a previous time period usually passed over quickly in the history books and the movies, the six months between December of 1941 and June of 1942.

Now that was a time when nothing was going right. The American Pacific fleet was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. More than 12,000 American soldiers in the Philippines were forced to surrender. The British lost Hong Kong and Singapore and looked like they were about to lose the Suez Canal. Australia was being bombed. The Nazis were almost a thousand miles inside of Russia and their submarines were sinking U.S. combat ships within sight of New York City and Miami. Japanese submarines were blithely shelling oil fields on the coast of California.

We were obviously losing the war.

My parents suffered the same symptoms I am suffering: anxiety, loss of sleep, short temper and frustration.

There was enough panic and paranoia to go around, and it had a foundation in fact. If you ever wondered how people could have allowed 12,000 of their fellow citizens to be shipped off to internment camps, you are feeling it right now - a desperate need to feel safe.

We're not smarter than the Americans of 1942. And for all the licensed therapists and the psychological self-help books published over the last 50 years, we are not better adjusted either.

But maybe Marcel Proust was wrong, and maybe humans can learn from their past behavior. Maybe.

Maybe if my parents could handle all of that I can handle this.

If London could stand up to 57 consecutive nights of bombing that killed more than 30,000, surely we can survive Dan Rather being exposed to anthrax. So maybe we should ask St. Agatha to hold off that big one for awhile. If it comes we can deal with it, but right now we're a little busy.