Sandy

“This is like déjà vu all over again” --- Yogi Berra

It’s Friday evening.  We are approaching the end of what has felt like the Week From Hell.  Hurricane Sandy has cut a swath through our lives.  As I write this, I’m watching still more footage of the devastation.  ‘Dateline’ is reporting from Staten Island.  Lives have been destroyed – literally, ended; as well as figuratively, cut to the quick, left with nothing.  I watch this from the comfort of my home in New England.  Save for a few moments without electricity earlier this week, we have been spared.  For this I am grateful, and feeling somehow guilty.

I feel guilty because I spent much of this week focused on my own, personal challenges, unrelated to the hurricane.  Absent context, I’d be writing about those.  It really was a rough week.  But there is, in fact, a much larger context.  Earlier this evening, Mayor Bloomberg made the wise decision to cancel the New York City Marathon, in deference to the larger context of death, destruction, and far greater need for scarce city resources.  I will follow his lead.

I am a Jersey Kid, born and bred.  I say that with pride.  The first of my ancestors to settle in New Jersey arrived in the late 1600s. There is a street in my hometown named after my mother.  The home in which I spent most of my childhood had a front porch from which one could see the city skyline, with the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center as prominent landmarks.  Although I’ve spent my entire adult life living elsewhere, New Jersey will always, on some level, be home.  So, while we have all watched in horror this week as news reports have shown us the flooded homes, the shredded boardwalks, the darkened city skyline, I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.  Or at least punched in the gut just a little harder than my Massachusetts and New Hampshire friends and neighbors who have no connections to the area. 

The video footage of the Jersey Shore devastation was especially hard to watch.  So many wonderful memories were made there.  It’s where I learned to swim.  It’s where I proposed to my wife (a native Bostonian.)  It’s one of a handful of places I’ve daydreamed of moving to in retirement someday – no slight intended to my beloved Cape Cod, also on the Short List.

At some point this week, it occurred to me that I’d seen this film before.  Or maybe it was an earlier director’s cut.  The television is still on, and I am still writing.  Now the news is telling me that Governor Christie has announced mandatory gas rationing, using an “odd /even license plate number” approach.  It is 1974.  The country is reeling from the “Arab Oil Embargo.”  I’ve seen this before.

Earlier this evening, there was a benefit concert for Sandy victims.  Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Billy Joel and others performed amidst photos of the hurricane devastation and pleas for donations.  It is 1985.  The “We Are The World” benefit concert, featuring the likes of Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, Cyndi Lauper, and yes, Bruce Springsteen AND Billy Joel take the stage.  I’ve seen this before.

My most poignant déjà vu moment came midweek, when President Obama toured New Jersey with Governor Christie.  The two men put aside their vast political differences and joined forces to get help to the hurricane victims, stat.  In that moment, it was clear to me, and, I think, clear to all but the most cynical of political animals that their motives were sincere, their cooperation genuine.  The political climate in our nation has been so toxic for so long that the contrast was striking. 

I had seen us all pull together at least once before, on September 11^th, 2001.  On that most horrible of days, and for a while afterward, our differences didn’t matter.  There were no racial or class differences.  There were no political parties.  There was only us, all of us, Americans, with tiny American flags duct-taped to our car radio antennas. 

I do not romanticize that dark chapter in our history.  It was without question the single most traumatic event I can remember.  Yet somehow, from the ashes of an absolute disaster, we came together.  We were united.  I caught a glimpse, a glimmer of that unity this week.  It’s still there, in the deep recesses of our collective consciousness.  Let’s try and find it again.  The past decade has seen more than its share of mean-spirited and ultimately pointless animosity.  We’ll never get to “Kumbaya” on issues that divide us.  But we can do better than we have in the recent past.  We proved it to each other this week, whether we realized it or not.

To the people of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and all of the other places still experiencing the pain of Hurricane Sandy, Godspeed.