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.

Historic Proportions

That’s the phrase the forecasters are using to describe Hurricane Sandy. If on the Perfect Storm scale, the 1991 New England event was a Perfect 10, this could be a Perfect 11, or so they say.

I grew up in New York City, and the whole notion of almost 400,000 people being evacuated is a completely foreign concept to me. The only hurricane I remember directly impacting us in Manhattan was Donna. It seemed like a big deal then, but I was young.

The T-shirts tell us (bleep) happens, and our modern (bleep) threshold is pretty low. Where I live, the TV stations go into frenetic STORMWATCH mode if a couple inches of rain threaten. But many of us can pass a lifetime without every witnessing a real cataclysm.

Crater Lake is a beautiful spot in Oregon visited by many tourists. The water fills an old volcanic caldera. The volcano, called Mt. Mazama, erupted thousands of years ago. I read once where this enormous blast covered parts of western North America in feet – FEET – of volcanic ash. But our continent was relatively unpopulated. There were no Eyewitness News teams around to record what happened. The most we have are stories passed down through oral tradition, and whatever after-the-fact evidence scientists are able to collect.

For those who can’t live without their adrenaline fix, the Weather Channel has a show called “It Could Happen Tomorrow.” The fact is, it already has. Just as an aside, the 18th and 19th centuries brought major earthquakes to Boston and to Charleston, South Carolina.

(Bleep) really did seem to happen in the 19th century. A huge earthquake rocked not California, but the central part of the country, along Missouri’s New Madrid fault in 1811 -- again, a relatively unpopulated area, but the quake caused the Mississippi River to run backwards. In 1859, the worst recorded solar flare ever to hit the Earth caused telegraph wires to burn up. A similar flare hitting the Earth the same way today would cause a Biblical-level catastrophe. We wouldn’t need hacker terrorists to wipe out our electrical grid. The sun would have done that for us.

For most of us alive today, the standout natural cataclysmic event may be the Japanese earthquake of 2011, which killed tens of thousands and triggered a devastating tsunami and a nuclear disaster. Contrast that with last night’s partiers gathering on Hawaiian beaches to witness a tsunami a few INCHES high.

As for cataclysmic events, they actually happen all the time, but the slower-moving ones sometimes escape our notice, especially if we’re not directly affected. Famine. Drought. Climate change. The virus-du-jour. But it also seems most cataclysmic events aren’t Mother Nature’s fault. We’re much better at doing these things to ourselves. War. Recession/depression, you name it.

(Bleep) is always going to happen. The story really isn’t about the (bleep); it’s about how we react to it. Sometimes we react well; other times we freak out.

But so far, one thing seems to be constant: We survive.