Please don't take what I'm about to say as downplaying the serious threat Sandy poses to life and property along the East Coast, particularly in coastal and rural areas prone to flash floods. Already cable news is reporting flooding in Virginia and expecting more in Delaware and Maryland. When Irene came through New England, it caused devastating river flooding there as well. These are bad things we don't wish on anyone.
But while this is going on The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore is planted in Battery Park in New York because that's where the story is, I guess. The only thing Sandy is going to do to New York City is convince them that they are better at living through something they choose to believe is an "intense storm" than are the poor stupid uncivilized folk who live along the Gulf Coast.
On the other hand, if there really is trouble there, I look forward to arguing against using federal tax dollars to rebuild flood prone Manhattan and, of course, sending a stream of Bywater hipsters to entrepreneur Brooklyn back to life.
In any case what it will definitely not do is engender a greater understanding in our northern cousins of the threats we face around here on an annual basis. On the contrary, their experience will only strengthen their resolve to leave us to fend for ourselves in the future. After all, they will have made it through a Cat 1 storm okay. Why should they put up with our whining, right?
2 comments:
I can relate to this frustration, oddly enough. Feel like I'm being rubbed the wrong way as both a native New Yorker and a New Orleanian who went through Katrina in MS. Already, I've probably alienated people here with some of my comments online about the pre-storm hysteria (worst example: dude at the grocery store literally shoving his cart straight into my body and using it to push me back in his frenzy to what, get to the rice first?) and regarding the...I don't know, total discounting of my (and many others') lived experience? Trying not to have blowhard thoughts, but it does feel hurtful, this attitude that it's apparently okay for me (to go through much worse), but not them, which I know is human nature, and that it's also okay for my family going back generations to have helped build nyc, but not for the frenzied to have to carry any weight for it now. Deep limbo, can't pick a "side."
The lesson here is to NEVER be where Jim Cantore is when there's gonna be a bad storm.
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