Hurricane Sandy

Power came back on at about 4:30 AM, and I woke up about 15 minutes later. I'd slept in socks, a t-shirt, my winter coat, and two pairs of pajama pants. According to Will's thermometer, the house was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit last night.

I woke up to familiar rumbles that I don't usually pay much attention to, like the little grinding rumble of the tiny fridge in the living room. As I opened my eyes I could see the little LEDs on the bedroom computer, the Ethernet hub, the Roku, and the speaker volume control knob. The radiator was still silent though.

I went out to the dining room and checked the wall clock. It read about 8:40. The power had stopped at about 8:25, so that's how I knew the power had come on 15 minutes before I'd gotten up.

I put in my contact lenses and booted up my computer. First order of business: sight.

I weighed myself and entered the data into my spreadsheet. Sandy had put about 5 lbs on me, from all the bags of chips, the soda, the bread, the nuts, the canned soups, and other grossness. It's hard to diet during a hurricane.

I came back from Brooklyn last night. Took the shuttle bus from Jay Street in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side. The lights were all on, the stores were open - many of them - and people were out and about. As I walked down along The Bowery, passed Houston, and then turned West, everything was still up and running. I passed a pizza joint with people inside, passionately downing large delicious slices of pizza, and thought, should I? I know there's no power near my apartment... should I?

But I didn't. I kept walking. As I approached Broadway I could see the lights and activity come to a sudden halt. It was night time already, and there were just no lights at all across Broadway. No traffic lights, no nothing. It surprised me, because I knew that a lot of little stores had been opening up and running on candle power or generators before I'd left.

I entered the dark zone, and put on my headlamp. Before I'd gone to Lauren's house I'd thought to myself, "should I bring this? Am I really going to need it? I know Lauren's got power, her whole neighborhood's got power. What's the point?" But I brought it anyway, just because it seemed prudent to carry my emergency equipment with me.

Now I was realizing what my intelligence had failed to tell me: I would quite possibly be returning home with the power still out, and I might need the headlamp to navigate the streets.

The headlamp made all the difference. Stumbling towards home in the dark would not have been fun - I know, because I stumbled towards home for about a block before putting the headlamp on. But as I walked, I noticed that there were indeed other lights to be seen. I passed people walking the other direction, who held flashlights. Sometimes a cyclist would pass, with a pedal-driven light blinking on their bike. And a very few windows were lit up, some with candles, some with actual power, though I had no idea where they were getting it from.

One restaurant, deep in the dark zone, had big signs that said "WE'RE OPEN". It was one of those super fancy SoHo restaurants where the quality go. Inside it was business as usual; TV producers discussing deals they were working on, while sniffing their wine glass and eating raw oysters.

I got the place to make me some salmon and veggies to go, and took it home to my apartment.

Will wasn't there. He'd gone to get food in Brooklyn, and was planning to get home in about an hour and a half or so. The apartment was desolate. It hadn't been that cold inside when I'd left. The lack of light felt oppressive. Lauren had lent me her little battery operated lantern, and I set it up on a bookshelf, and that was almost like having power back; but not really.

Lauren hadn't slept much the night before. She'd been up most of the night checking the news stories about communities in Staten Island and Coney Island that were experiencing horrible conditions. When I called josette as I walked home that next evening (cell phone service working again, yay), I found out that josette had been equally concerned and disturbed over the fate of those communities.

I hadn't been as affected as they were about it. I knew the situation was pretty devastating for a lot of people. Homes destroyed, people killed. Meanwhile I was surrounded by my dear possessions, reading my kindle, playing games on my cell phone, and eating gourmet take-out. I think it was the gourmet take-out that did it. I suddenly felt very guilty to have it so good right now, while whole communities had been destroyed by the hurricane, and seemed to be getting very little assistance from the government that was nevertheless tending to my neighborhood quite attentively.

I also happen to be reading "Solo", by Rana DasGupta, and I was up to the part about World War II, where there was a lot of civil strife in Bulgaria, followed by fascism, followed by communism, and the main character is buffeted around and has to watch all his friends and family go through a lot of hardships, while also going through a lot of hardships himself. Actually, it's a really good book. I recommend it.

But the book, and the fact that there were such horrors going on just a few miles from my home, sort of hit me suddenly. And I thought of the US government at its various levels, and how it had responded to the emergency. On the one hand, I thought, it's all so disingenuous; a lot of the governmental and private organizations responding to the hurricane couldn't care less about the people affected; they just wanted to get things running again so they wouldn't lose another $50,000,000,000 in 4 days. It was all about the money to them. And President Obama even said, the focus was on getting the economy back up in the region.

And on the other hand, at least in this novel I'm reading, the fascists and the communists are portrayed as being utterly indifferent to human life, and concerned only with doctrine and with the absolute appearance of a loyalty they don't feel in the slightest.

I'm not pro-capitalist. The Democrats and Republicans are both far too right-wing for my tastes. But sitting there in my room yesterday, I could see how to some extent, there was a real distinction to be drawn between what we have here currently, and what we'd have in an authoritarian situation.

I'd like to figure out a system that would be better than what we've got. What system, other than the market and greed, would motivate the government and other large organizations, to help people better than they were helped during Hurricane Sandy?

I've thought a fair bit about what kind of system of government I would set up if I could. I almost look at it like creating a game, where the people playing might be trying to cheat; and the rules of the game have to take account of that, and lead all the players inexorably towards the best possible decisions.

That's pretty vague. But I didn't say I'd actually solved the problem. Recently my dad recommended the book, "Rawls", by Samuel Freeman. I'd read the biographical portions, and realized that political philosophy is not the study of how wheelers and dealers trick each other and horse-trade in order to be powerful politicians. Political philosophy is about fundamental questions that any system of government needs to address; like, "what is justice?"

It's a very different approach to the problem of government than what I had taken. I'd been more concerned with protecting government from anyone attempting to gain too much individual power. In the approach I'd taken, people were involved in government at such an indirect level, that no single person, or even large group, would be able to influence its workings to any appreciable degree. Government would have a relationship to individuals, not unlike the relationship of the brain to its individual cells.

But reading about Rawls, this no longer seemed like such a straightforward proposition. My conception of the governing brain didn't take into account any concept of justice. And reading "Solo", I could see how a government that was too indifferent to the individual, might lead to other kinds of problems.

So I don't know. But living through Hurricane Sandy, and knowing that this is really very likely to happen again on a regular basis, I think the problem of government is quite relevant to what's going on; and it's being driven home to the people in Staten Island and Coney Island and elsewhere; and it seems as though it'll be driven home to a lot more people as well, before long. Anyone who suddenly finds themselves bereft of everything they'd thought was secure - or at least, relatively secure - will have to be thinking very closely about the way their government responds to such things, and why.