Power outage

[bcholmes]

From the Toronto Star:

And, mercifully, it really was a little sojourn in the dark and not a prolonged absence of power like the ones to which the people in developing nations and countries recently bombed by the United States are accustomed.

Comments

[eve-l-incarnata.livejournal.com]

THANKS for posting that. I was thinking along similar lines when people were acting like it was the end of the world.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

It's hard not to sound selfish about this, but I do think a power outage is just factually harder the more your life has been built to depend on the power. I'm not even talking about air conditioning, which I know I'm spoiled by. But food spoiling in freezers, people in high-rises without water, the subways just stopping underground--the more you have planned on it, the worse when it's taken away.

On the other hand, even the few US hospitals that had too-limited back-up generators were still functioning, a very different story from certain "developing nations and countries recently bombed by the United States."

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

...and then, there are people who can't abide by human pride in anything. This article sounded like so much bitter, cynical jabbing at anything and everything. I'm not saying he wasn't right about a number of things, but the focus he chose for the article pretty much invalidates any positive comments he deigned to throw in. But hey, I guess there'll always be people who choose to diminish the achievements of those around them, and who cares what those achievements are.

No, it wasn't a disaster. In my brief twenty-odd years alive, I've been through worse. But then, most North Americans haven't, and somehow, no one bothers to put things in perspective. It isn't just about the severity of the "incident" itself. It's also, in a very significant measure, about the degree to which that incident differs from the norm.

To make the point: When I was living in Russia, simple things like butter weren't very easily available. I remember being exceedingly proud of myself for standing two and a half hours in line, during which I had managed to save my spot and run to my parents' and grandparents' houses, get all our citizens' cards, and buy the 2.4 kg of butter. See, butter was dispensed at 400g per citizen, with identification only. I was ten, incidentally.

Guess how much people would've cared if the (mostly empty) stores had lost power.

Now, imagine that happening in Canada.

[kat-chan.livejournal.com]

One of the more amusing things that I heard in response to the blackout was from Baghdad, where an Iraqi man said that he was glad that Americans were going to get a small taste of what they've dealt with for the last three months. After all, a blackout in 90F heat for seven hours isn't quite like three months without power during a 130F summer. These poor people in Baghdad have had no power and no phone and the US is doing nothing to fix those destroyed portions of the infrastructure. They're more concerned about policing instead of rebuilding.

As for keeping this in perspective, my hometown has suffered from a tornado, a 50-year flood (if not a 100-year flood), and the blackout in the last nine months. Yes, it all sucks, and the city's getting alot of opportunity to work out the kinks in their emergency management system. But I think that if people took a moment and thought about how people in other countries have it, they'd realize it could be alot worse. Or I'd hope so, at least.