Fun With FEMA!

By Amelie Gillette | April 30, 2009 | 9:46pm

Aux Features Books

We already know that FEMA can be incompetent on a grand scale, but can they handle something small like, say, producing and distributing a coloring book designed to help kids cope in the wake of a disaster? As it turns out, no. They completely bungled that simple task too.

According to The Smoking Gun, FEMA had this coloring book available for download on their website until this past Tuesday, when they took it down in response to criticism about the book's inclusion of super-fun-to-color pictures of 9/11. Really, though, that's just one reason why this coloring book shouldn't exist.

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Determining the worst part about "A Scary Thing Happened" is like figuring out which of a porcupine's quills is the sharpest. Still, I think the worst part about this coloring book isn't its many, many frightening depictions of disasters—It's called "A Scary Thing Happened," after all, so some pictures of scary things happening should probably be included for traumatized children to color in once their hands stop shaking—it's the fact that the mission behind "A Scary Thing Happened" is completely misguided. The book is supposed to help kids who have survived disasters, or who have heard about a disaster process that disaster. The best way to do that is probably not by forcing open their healing psychological wounds with crayons.

Also, it includes way too many disasters. It's like a trauma catch-all. Take a look:

There's a family who, for some reason, walked into their burning house:

A tornado, which was apparently willed into existence by a creepy blob kid wearing a phony "good kid award" medal in a void somewhere:

There's a terrible flood:

A girl who is trapped inside the all-9/11 sensory assault chamber:

Another, infinitely more frightening house fire:

And a wind tunnel where decapitated heads just fly around:

So either FEMA should narrow the focus of their make-a-pretty-picture-out-of-your-disaster-trauma book—just pick one terrible occurence at a time—or this coloring book was made with a very specific disaster survivor in mind: a kid who had been through two house fires, a tornado, 9/11, a flood, and a wind tunnel where decapitated heads just fly around. It has to be said: Heck of a job, FEMA.