A Bad Time for Control Freaks

Occasionally it seems that Mother Nature feels the need to remind us that we aren’t in control, and that there are no guarantees in life, and no place, on Earth at least, where we’re 100 percent safe.

Just when Americans start to feel that catastrophic events don’t really happen here, we get a Katrina, or a Sandy, or an F5 tornado. Earthquakes happen where they aren’t supposed to – at least in our narrow little concept of what we call history. We talk about 100-year storms and 500-year storms. What was Sandy? A 1,000-year storm? There’s no file footage for when the last time this happened.

I was moved by two things this morning in the media reporting about Sandy. The female Weather Channel anchor was cold, tired, and feeling a little giddy, and made sort of an inappropriate joke (which I won’t explain). Her co-anchors weren’t sure what to do with it. But they chalked it up to her being punchy after many hours with no sleep, soaked to the skin. Then there was the New Jersey reporter standing in the middle of a hard-hit coastal town who broke down for a few seconds – as did the police chief of the same town whom he had interviewed a half-hour earlier. When disasters happen, reporters and public safety people don’t get to be human beings – at least right away – but eventually, it has to come out. Control goes out the window.

What hasn’t happened yet, at least on a large scale, is the blame game – who should have done what when. But there are some events that are way beyond games like that, and this is one of them. This is even beyond “you chose to live there and you should have known better.” There’s no argument about big government or small government – maybe this is one of those times that no government can ever be quite big enough. The absolute last thing he’s thinking about right now, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, is next week’s election. All of a sudden, control over time, in the form of a schedule, is secondary. Or tertiary, or whatever comes after that.

In the space of a few hours, what we’ve earned, what we’ve built, what we’ve collected, can disappear. The control freak’s worst nightmare isn’t a Katrina or a Sandy. It’s having to rely on others for help.

As John Lennon once said, life is what happens when you’ve made other plans. But life is also about flexibility, and our ability, and even the opportunity, to make new ones when we have to.