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How Hurricane Sandy Downgraded the Election and Upgraded Our Barn-Raising Spirit
Posted: 10/30/2012 1:04 pm
Hurricane Sandy may have been downgraded from
Category 2
after it barreled through the Caribbean, but it sure didn't feel like
it. What was unmistakable, though, was how quickly and completely Sandy
downgraded our election. What had been a Category 5 story was suddenly a
mere Topical Disturbance. As Sandy moved in, the election was almost
literally moved off the map, as both candidates
canceled
appearances. Instead of huddling with David Axelrod and David Plouffe,
Obama was huddled with disaster preparedness and relief officials in the
Situation Room -- the one in the White House, not the one on CNN.
People went from checking the
New York Times'
Nate Silver every five minutes to hanging on to every word of Weather Underground's
Dr. Jeff Masters or
Louis Uccellini,
director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, whose
predictive models carried much more immediate weight than who was going
to win the Wal-Mart moms vote. And early voting was
canceled in Maryland.
But Sandy didn't just knock the campaign off the front pages; it
transformed it, as well. At a moment of extreme polarization, Mother
Nature brought us together. Suddenly, the artificial walls that our
political process erects to separate us into little demographic
micro-groups to make us believe we have no mutual interests got blown
away by the massive hurricane. As if to emphasize how interconnected we
all are, it turns out that the full moon -- the one we'd have seen last
night if the clouds would have let us -- was
in league with the hurricane to amplify its effects.
Hurricane Sandy brought about the true bipartisanship our leaders
only give lip service to. Suddenly, in a campaign in which the biggest
issue, broadly defined, has been the role of government, nobody is
saying: Why is government involved? Governors in the affected states
aren't asking the "job creators" for help -- they're asking the federal
government. And the government -- that is, the American people -- has
been thankfully responding. Suddenly it's much easier to see the purpose
of government -- to make our collective power more effective.
In New Jersey Chris Christie, the same governor who gave the
keynote speech
on the night of the RNC devoted to slamming Obama's statement that
government has a role to play in helping people build businesses,
praised
President Obama for his readiness to send aid to New Jersey and wisely
chose not to limit New Jersey's options for help to resources within the
state. "I appreciated the president's outreach today in making sure
that we know he's watching this and is concerned about the health and
welfare and safety of the people of the state of New Jersey," said
Governor Christie.
"[President Obama] called me last night around midnight... to ask
what else could be done [and] offered any other assets that we need,"
said
Christie. "I have to say the administration, the president himself and
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate have been outstanding with us so far. We
have a great partnership with them, and I want to thank the president
personally for his personal attention to this." Earlier Christie had
asked
the president to give the state Federal Disaster Designation in advance
of the storm so aid could begin to flow -- a request the president
granted.
And it wasn't just the federal government, but state and local
governments that were responding to protect the lives and property of
their citizens. In New York, nearly 400,000 people were
evacuated from flood zones, and the subways were
shut down (a laborious process that can take up to ten hours) for only the second time ever. The Department of Homeless Services
stepped up
their efforts to encourage those living in the streets to come into the
shelters. The Virginia National Guard got the go-ahead to
bring up 500 troops to help clear roads. And state and local utilities along the East Coast
readied thousands of repair crews to help the millions who have lost power.
Then there were the warnings that reminded us that government
deployed real human beings who made a life-and-death difference, and
that our responsibilities flow both ways. "If you don't evacuate, you
are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives
of the first responders who are going in to rescue you,"
said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even more blunt, or "poignant," as Dr. Jeff Masters rightly
put it, was this warning by the National Weather Service in New Jersey:
"If you are reluctant [to evacuate], think about your loved
ones, think about the emergency responders who will be unable to reach
you when you make the panicked phone call to be rescued, think about the
rescue/recovery teams who will rescue you if you are injured or recover
your remains if you do not survive."
We can no longer summon the bipartisanship needed to rebuild our
infrastructure, or even adequately repair what we have, but at least we
can come together to protect it from the worst -- if we're absolutely
forced to by a calamity like Hurricane Sandy. But why can't we have this
same responsiveness in times other than natural disasters? It was only
in February of last year that the Republicans
proposed a bill
to cut $1.2 billion from President Obama's budget proposal for the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the
satellites that allow us to track hurricanes like Sandy and give
accurate and timely warnings. And in a debate during the primaries, Mitt
Romney was asked if FEMA should be shut down and disaster
responsibility given to the states. His
reply:
"Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take
something from the federal government and send it back to the states,
that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it
back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in
the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite
question, what should we keep?"
Does that include disaster relief? asked moderator John King.
"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without
jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view,
for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on
to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before
it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."
The Romney campaign
responded
Monday that Romney wants to "ensure states... have the resources and
assistance they need to cope with natural disasters." Maybe Hurricane
Sandy reset the Etch-A-Sketch (it doesn't take much of a storm to do
that, after all). In any case, as Matt Yglesias
points out,
Romney's budget in fact has steep cuts in everything that's not
defense. And if you exempt Medicare from Romney's across the board cuts,
the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
estimates that would mean cuts of around 53 percent in things like FEMA.
But for the moment, we're having a period of bipartisan agreement --
forced on us by something truly bigger than ourselves -- that government
is useful. Whether or not "you built that," if a hurricane knocks it
down, it's nice to have FEMA help you rebuild that.
Unfortunately, this spirit of bipartisanship is projected to last
only for about 72 more hours or so, before burning itself out and
dissipating somewhere over Canada.
Which is too bad, because we badly need bipartisanship and collective
effort not just to rebuild our infrastructure and solve problems like
the jobs crisis but to address the root causes of what makes storms like
this one so increasingly powerful and increasingly common.
But our election season is drawing to a close without any serious
discussion about climate change. "The irony is that the two presidential
candidates decided not to speak about climate change, and now they are
seeing the climate speak to them,"
said Mike Tidwell, director of Maryland's Chesapeake Climate Action Network and author of the 2006 climate change book,
The Ravaging Tide. "That's really what's happening here. The climate is now speaking to them -- and to everyone else."
Michael Mann, physicist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State
says
that, while we can't conclusively blame any one storm on climate
change, "we can see that climate change is playing a role in setting the
context for these storms, in particular the record levels of North
Atlantic ocean warmth that is available to feed these storms with energy
and moisture." And according to research by the German reinsurance
company
Munich Re,
there's been "a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events
in North America for the past three decades." Last month, a
report
issued by Yale and George Mason universities found that 74 percent of
American people believe that "global warming is affecting weather in the
United States." And that was before Hurricane Sandy.
The collective effort, the we're-all-in-this-together spirit, has
been great to see. We know that spirit is there, even if we hadn't seen
in much in the weeks leading up to this disaster. But it shouldn't take a
natural disaster to make us tap into our natural humanity. Let's hope
that spirit can linger, even as Sandy moves on.
And in the meantime, here is a
page we've put up for anybody who wants to lend a helping hand.
end quote from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/hurricane-sandy-downgraded-election_b_2044095.html
Like right after Hurricane Katrina rebuilding the east coast will be a team effort just like the rebuilding of New Orleans in 2005. If the subway isn't up for weeks or months because of pumping the water out or electrical problems, New Yorkers can deal with this somehow. If 3 cities have been completely flooded out and literally everyone had to be rescued from those 3 New Jersey towns, the people in New Jersey can deal with that. If 80 to 110 homes have been burnt down in Queens, the citizens of Queens and New York can deal with that. It's the CAN-DO attitude of Americans that has always amazed the rest of the world. Now is the time!
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