After reading the many posts describing Sandy's wake - especially in New Jersey - I am very thankful to be able to report that I don't have much to report on, other than life more or less as normal. We had another regatta over the weekend and I crewed with another colleague in an RS400. No major mistakes and relatively good starts. Third place overall.
I really felt for those in the Northeast and their hardships and am very glad that Baydog, Frogma, George and others came through without a major disaster scenario.
Of course there were people who lost their lives or their houses and many communities suffered devastation that will have long lasting effects.
I had an interesting conversation last night over dinner with a Lebanese friend that caused me to reflect a bit. We talked a bit about the ravages of Sandy and he said that a friend from New York had described the situation to him as like a "war zone". He said that for someone from Lebanon, that was a bit much. He wasn't meaning to belittle the real suffering, but he meant to distinguish between a natural disaster and a human-made war disaster. It made me think - living any disaster is bad enough, but how hard it must be to live a human-made war disaster - lasting an unknown and often very long time, perhaps involving enemies who were once neighbors. And no opportunity to come together as a community to repair the damage, let alone hoping for any government help - and being mostly ignored by the rest of the world. How utterly soul destroying that must be.
It's certain that it's not easy to compare disasters. To someone who has lost a loved one, or home, they may not feel in the position to make that kind of comparison. But I agree, how much more terrible it must be to know that the distraction around you was willfully caused…
ReplyDeleteWhich is more deadly? Man or nature? The nature of both is to live and die. Oddly, there is both ugliness and beauty to be found from both man and nature in the midst of disaster ... if you look for it.
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