Wednesday morning, just three days after Hawaii's incident, Japan apparently decided to jump on the false missile alert bandwagon as well! Broadcaster NHK warned that "North Korea appears to have launched a missile" around 7 p.m. local time. Citizens were told to take shelter. Unlike the situation in Hawaii, however, which took 38 minutes to rectify, Japan took just under 10 minutes to assuage their public's fears. Interesting.

Obviously, these are two different situations. I'm not going to pretend I know much about our civil defense system or nuclear preparations or anything like that. I also do appreciate that there are measures in place to warn citizens were something like this to actually to occur. However, I find a little concerning that:

a) it took nearly 40 minutes to correct, and...

b) it's possible for an alert of this magnitude to have happened on accident.

Understanding how it happened does little to change the fact that it did happen, and it caused widespread panic.

I really wanted to think it was just a joke I was missing out on when I first heard about the false ballistic missile threat in Hawaii. After all, I'm the person who thought the whole "do you know da wae" thing was just a reference to a song I didn't know. I figured Hawaii just another news headline putting a spin on a story in order to get unsuspecting readers to click it. I mean, how do you accidentally send an entire state an alert about an incoming missile?

Unfortunately, however, the headline wasn't just clickbait. Apparently, a civil defense employee "pushed the wrong button" this past Saturday morning and triggered a state-wide alert about a "ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii." Wow. Considering the recently growing tension between leaders of the United States and North Korea, I'm more than a little worried. Need I remind anyone of this tweet from our dear president?

My social studies teachers in elementary and middle school all used to tell me that we learn history so that we don't repeat the mistakes of our past. Nowadays, I can't help but thinking the world we currently live in is eerily reminiscent of the Cold War in terms of the threats of nuclear warfare, as well as the suggestions of a nuclear arms race.

But, I digress. I'm sure Saturday's incident in Hawaii won't happen again and that Japan just made an honest mistake. While Japan's threat is still under investigation, the employee responsible for the Hawaii threat apparently "feels terrible," and now there will be a "two-person rule implemented for sending tests and actual alerts." After all, even Trump himself was so unworried that he figured his golf game was more important than letting 1.5 million people know they weren't facing their impending doom.

The internet, of course, is having a field day with the entire situation.

So that's it. If we're joking about it, it's all over, right? We can now continue carrying on like normal and playing the "What did Trump say about North Korea now?" game. Joy.