In the past week, the nation has suffered two great paroxysms: a once-in-a-generation “superstorm,” and a presidential election.
History will be the judge of which of these storms was the more expensive and destructive, but from this citizen’s perspective, there were certain similarities.
Keep in mind that I’m filing this column several days before the election, without knowledge of the outcome, armed only with the predictions of the pollsters and pundits, who are declaring the race a dead heat.
Freed from the burden of sharing my personal jubilation or disappointment with the results, I can say, without fear of being labeled partisan in any way, that this has been one of the most frustrating, exhausting, and dispiriting political seasons in memory.
Let me make an analogy from the world of hurricanes. No one is nostalgic for the bad old days of storm prediction, when a few hours’ warning was considered a luxury, and devastating cyclones were just as likely to make surprise landfall as they were to blow harmlessly out to sea, making a mockery of meteorologists and civil planners. These days, with the benefit of satellites, supercomputers, and highly refined software algorithms, it’s possible for experts to see a pressure disturbance somewhere in Caribbean and extrapolate big trouble more than a week away.
That’s what happened with Hurricane Sandy. Seven days before Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coast, when she was just another tropical storm set to stomp Haiti and sandblast Cuba, alarm bells were ringing: Sandy was a different kind of storm, a very dangerous one; and she was looking to draw a bead on the Mid-Atlantic.
Those seven days were crucial to our preparations for the storm. We raked and cleared drains; we trenched and regraded; we laid in supplies; we recharged everything in the house that was chargeable; we did laundry; we froze soup.
We took seriously the warning that power could be out for weeks. With that in mind, we voted early.
Thousands of other Baltimoreans had the same idea. The Sunday before Sandy hit, the polling place, a former public school that had been converted into a police training facility, was packed. The line snaked up and down the halls. In the three hours — three hours! — it took to travel from the front door to a gymnasium full of voting booths, we inched forward under banners meant to encourage young cadets. The words “Honor,” “Integrity,” and “Courage” became unofficial waypoints on our long journey to cast our vote.
The atmosphere was festive, if a bit manic, as if we were refugees who’d finally made it to the border after a long and harrowing journey.
And it had been harrowing, more than a year of negativity, pettiness, misrepresentation, and bald manipulation — on both sides — all of it fueled by a tsunami of money poured into the campaigns by corporations and unions, a consequence of the extremely unfortunate Supreme Court decision nicknamed “Citizens United.”
Part of what made the seemingly endless campaign so exhausting was the new reach of media into every corner of our lives. Yesterday’s television and newspapers, with their quaint daily news cycle, have given way to today’s smartphones and iPads with their 24/7 newsfeeds and blogs.
Just as it’s now possible to study a hurricane’s projected track, day and night, on five different websites, the better to maximize anxiety, we’re seduced into losing sleep to wall-to-wall campaign coverage, the latest polling data, the best photo-ops, the worst gaffes. Our guy’s ahead! Hooray! Oh, no, he’s behind! Boo! And what will happen if he loses?
When the storm finally comes, and you feel true fear in your belly — fear for your house, for your loved ones, for your life — you realize that all the obsessive attention you’ve paid to the predictions, to talk of “midlateral troughs” and “vertical heat engines,” to projected storm tracks — all of it is simply an attempt to manage the unmanageable.
The skies open up. Rain pounds the roof. Terrifying gusts shake the house and rattle the windows. The lights flicker and go out.
But then it’s over. That’s the beauty of these storms. They come, and then they go.
For the lucky ones, Sandy was merely an inconvenience, another of Nature’s bullets dodged. For others, there are weeks ahead of misery; months of rebuilding; perhaps even years of grief.
Natural disasters have a way of putting man-made ones into perspective.
There’s a little known side to hurricanes: they serve an important atmospheric function, the transfer of massive amounts of heat energy from warmer climes to cooler ones. We see them in terms of the havoc they wreak in our little lives, but these storms are operating on a much bigger stage, the regulation of earth’s climate.
Just so, elections. Whatever havoc they may wreak in our households and communities, they’re an expression of a much bigger phenomenon.
Democracy.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 08 November 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
