What’s the difference between superstorm Sandy and the horrible events that preceded it — from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to Hurricane Hugo in 1989 to Hurricane Irene in 2011?
Answer: They happened in summer. This is November.
It’s cold. And getting colder.
All those storms did much greater damage overall and caused far greater loss of life. But for the 4 million without power in the greater New York City area in the fifth day of the aftermath, the casual, minute-by-minute suffering is fast becoming comparable.
Shortages of potable water, food running low and hundreds and hundreds of square miles from Lower Manhattan to Suffolk County to the Jersey Shore to the Connecticut shore plunging into darkness as the clock strikes 6 — this is what modern civilization is designed to defend against.
The powerlessness is not only electrical, though that is the most obvious aspect of it; it is actual.
There is nothing to be done against 13 feet of water except escape it or suffer it and its aftermath. We were powerless against this force of nature, and we are right to be humbled in the wake of it.
But we are not, as a polity, powerless to mitigate the effects of the aftermath.
Indeed, maintaining civilization at times of extreme risk to civilized conduct is the reason government exists in the first place — because we come together in societies in the first place in a mutual-defense pact against foes and forces that seek to do us ill.
And it is this primary role in which it appears our governments, local and state and federal, are failing us.
We are choosing a president and thousands of other elected officials in a few days’ time. These people have two responsibilities. The first is explicit: They are supposed to act as representatives on our behalf in the management of our government. The second is implicit: They are supposed to be our leaders in times of trouble and crisis.
Are they being leaders?
What we are getting from them is a variety of emotional and tactical responses, none of them reassuring or comforting or confidence-inspiring.
In press briefing after press briefing, Mayor Bloomberg rattles off data points in the same tone and spirit in which he announces he’s closing off Park Avenue to vehicular traffic for a fun Sunday in August.
The information, both inane and important, is intended to create the impression of action, that his “good plan” has been carefully conceived and is all going according to schedule. That’s very nice for him, and he always seems to end his briefings with a sense of satisfaction.
But the true human disasters in the city have been taking place in Staten Island and the Rockaways, and along the Brooklyn shore — and aside from mentions of the horrible fires in Breezy Point, you simply would not have known it until the media began reporting on it three days late.
The infrastructure crisis is real and dealing with it is pressing, but it isn’t really his job; the MTA transportation system is independent of the mayor and so is Con Edison.
Staten Island is his job. The Rockaways are his job.
For his part, Gov. Cuomo offers oleaginous thanks to many people on stage with him, thereby exempting them from his pivot into Andrew-the-threatening-guy.
His own briefings keep devolving into ominous warnings to utility companies — the beloved whipping boy of all politicians, as though in this case LIPA and Con Edison had magical powers to suck out the water and dry out the transformers and get men on poles when there is no gas for their trucks or for the trucks of the men who have to remove the fallen trees from everyone’s path on Long Island.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has gone in the other direction. He has shown plenty of powerful emotion — too much, perhaps, speaking in terms alternately apocalyptic and mournful about the end of the Jersey shore and looking less like someone resolute and determined than someone whose job has overwhelmed him.
I don’t join with others who assume Christie had Machiavellian motives in reveling in his bromance with Barack Obama; he seemed shaken and in need of a president’s reassurance.
The horrors afflicting Jersey would shake anyone, but this is a job he wanted and a job he sought and a responsibility he holds, and while his mournful countenance is understandable, it does not provide the reassurance a more contained and more resolute gubernatorial affect might.
The country turned on George W. Bush for his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Our area has been kinder to its leaders until now.
Until now.