The worst of Hurricane Sandy hit last Monday night. By
Wednesday, the media was congratulating everyone on a job well
done.
President Obama toured New Jersey’s battered coastline and was
praised by Governor Chris Christie for his response. New Yorkers,
Big Gulps forgotten, rallied around Mayor Michael Bloomberg and
chuckled at his press conference’s energetic sign language. The
press gushed with praise for America’s leaders, fired off
autopenned columns about how the right’s small-government
philosophy was finally refuted, and breathed a sigh of relief.
There was just one problem. New Yorkers, as they often do,
forgot about Staten Island.
The borough’s president, Jim Molinaro, had to attack the Red
Cross and call the New York City Marathon “asinine” before he
finally got the media’s attention. The scenes on the news shifted,
from devastated but mostly empty coastal towns to real people who
were cold, miserable, starving, isolated. Bloomberg suddenly looked
like a callous fool. Obama was in Las Vegas.
The feds eventually arrived, but Staten Islanders say the help
was tardy and pitiful. FEMA, which was supposed to distribute 24
million gallons of fuel to New York and New Jersey, is instead
presiding over shortages and Jimmy Carter-style gas lines. Where’s
the fuel? No one seems to know.
This should sound eerily familiar. When Hurricane Katrina hit
New Orleans in 2005, there was a brief period of calm after the
storm where everyone relaxed and assumed the government would bring
order. It wasn’t until days later that the true horror started to
emerge: filthy conditions at the Superdome, unused public buses
filled with water, looting.
The point isn’t to contrast Obama’s disaster management to
Bush’s; Sandy is a very different storm that struck a very
different part of the country. It’s also not to identify a double
standard between the media’s coverage of the two presidents,
although one surely exists.
The real lesson is that disasters will always wreak havoc.
Whatever the policy, whosever in charge, man can’t measure up to
the destructive forces of nature. Bury the government in money, and
bad things will still happen.
That’s not to say the feds shouldn’t try to save lives. It’s
also not to say that FEMA should have its funding cut. Most
conservatives would agree that emergency management is one of the
federal government’s legitimate responsibilities. But too many seem
to think that if we shovel funding at competent leaders, we’ll have
spic-and-span disaster cleanup. This reached a feverish point after
Katrina when many progressives went beyond faulting Bush’s
leadership skills and outright blamed him for the entire
hurricane.
That’s not how it works. Nature doesn’t really give a damn.
In the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens, New York, a fire
ignited that torched 110 homes, leaving a barren field of ash and
charred debris. New York’s first responders, the best in the world
with no shortage of funding, couldn’t navigate the floodwaters
until the inferno was raging. It was a brutal, achingly human
moment.
After the fire ran its course, an Associated Press photographer
snapped the most poignant picture of Sandy’s devastation. Amidst a
hellscape of smoking debris, a statue of the Virgin Mary
impossibly still stood.
In this age of computer models and technocrats and whiz kids who
think they can calculate the future, sometimes we’re reminded that
certain things are beyond man’s control. Certain things are still
the province of God.
Yes, President Obama deserves criticism for high-tailing it to
Vegas while New Jersey was underwater. And Mitt Romney’s position
on FEMA funding should be discussed. But try to make a deep
political or policy point about a crushing wall of water, and
you’re going to come up short.
Take global warming. The hurricane’s most noisome parasites were
climatologists, the smuggest and most audacious prognosticators
this side of Nostradamus, who demanded that we take action to stop
climate change — or “listen” to Sandy, as
one Huffington Post writer put it. Of course, if we
follow their counsel and they’re wrong, we’ll have needlessly
downsized the American economy… which will, of course, make it
harder to respond to natural disasters. But at least those filthy
light bulbs will be gone.
Tear down every belching power plant and replace it with a solar
panel, and we’ll still have hurricanes. Turn the entire federal
budget over to FEMA and make its administrator, Craig Fugate, the
de facto commander-in-chief, and national disasters will still
displace people. Loudly declare that big government is vindicated,
and shivering survivors will still emerge wondering why they’re not
being helped.
Should we “listen” to Hurricane Sandy? If so, maybe the message
we hear should be one of humility. May God bless all the survivors
and may the dead rest in peace.
