Posted on 08/20/2003 5:31:17 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Reflections in a blackout
Posted: August 20, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
First, the lights flickered, then they went out. Then, they came on again. Then they went out, for good. August demand for air conditioning overloaded the circuits, I thought.
The hall was dark as I made my way down to "the nook," the guest studio at NBC's offices at 30 Rockefeller Center.
I called MSNBC to volunteer a live report from "30 Rock" on the blackout and what was going on below on 6th Avenue. They said they would get back to me. But when they called, the phone did not ring. No matter. The blackout was now an international story, from Detroit to Toronto to Connecticut. Fifty million had lost power.
My wife and I made our way down a darkened fire escape to emerge onto Sixth Avenue and walk the 10 blocks to Essex House. The restaurant was not serving, but we were handed bottles of water before taking the stairs to our room on the 7th floor. The electronic keys were still working. Then, it was a minibar dinner of cashews, pretzels, potato chips and a Snickers bar. Junk food was better than no food.
By morning, electricity was back, but cell phones were still not working and the planes not flying. There seemed no way out of the Big Apple. But when a car arrived to transport me to MSNBC, I told the driver to make it D.C. Five hours later, we were at 400 N. Capitol St. in time for the 6 p.m. show.
Yet during the night previous, as I looked out over the world's greatest city, suddenly gone dark, the vulnerability of our high-tech nation was transparent in the blackness that enveloped Central Park and the Upper East and West Side. Had this blackout lasted another 48 hours, the situation could have deteriorated with startling speed and gone ugly fast.
For the 8 million living there, food in refrigerators and freezers would have begun to spoil. With no electricity for stoves or ovens, nothing could have been cooked. Unless families had dry food on hand, scores of thousands would have had to go panic-buying at stores, where the shelves would have soon been empty.
With pumping stations shutting down for lack of power, the faucets would no longer work and the toilets no longer flush.
Looking down on Central Park South the night of that blackout, one saw, in the glare of the headlights, folks on rollerblades and bicycles. The next morning, a line of SUVs was at the hotel, picking up passengers and luggage, and headed for the bridges and tunnels out of Manhattan. If you owned a car and had a tank of gas, you could make it 300 miles south to where the electricity was on.
But the lines at the gas pumps were lengthening, and one heard of stations already charging $10 a gallon.
Hearing the sirens wail all night and wondering – were the cops racing to rescue trapped subway riders, or save citizens from muggers or looters? – I thought: If I lived here, Sullivan Law or no Sullivan Law, I would keep a gun and ammunition in the house.
Yet, unlike 1977, where the rioting and looting started as soon as the lights went out, this blackout was relatively crime-free. Had it lasted for days, though, I doubt it would have remained so.
This thought also came to mind: If millions of Americans are angry at having been deprived of the amenities of life for 24 hours, what must life be like in Baghdad. There, they have had no power, or power only a few hours a day, in a nation that has gone through 12 years of sanctions, from which estimates of the dead run to the hundreds of thousands, with the casualties highest among the elderly and children under 5. Do they blame us, hate us, for that?
Woodrow Wilson called sanctions the "silent deadly remedy." Their impact is invariably harshest on the most vulnerable of any society, rarely on the regime or dictator. And what benefit do we derive from our sanctions on Cuba, Burma, Iran, North Korea to justify the suffering we cause and to compensate for the hatred engendered?
The blackout was a wake-up call, the president said. We have to invest scores of billions of dollars in new power plants and power lines. But the U.S. government is $455 billion in deficit and over $6 trillion in debt.
Moreover, we are looking at huge new costs for prescription drug coverage for seniors and perhaps a $300 billion to $600 billion price tag for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Meanwhile, white-collar jobs, with high wages, are now following blue-collar jobs overseas, as the world's poor pour into the United States. Virtually every state is now a mini-California, slashing expenditure or raising taxes.
Now, we are told, we need to enlarge the armed forces to meet our expanding commitments overseas. Something's got to give
Good old Pat. His hatred for the United States has completely overtaken him.
If, as he claims, the US is responsible for all those who hate it, then it stands to reason that Pat Buchanan is responsible for all the people who hate him.
Haha. A-men, brutha!
He forgets to mention that the overwhelming percentage (nearly 100%) of Cubans and North Koreans as well as about 70% of Iranians (according to most polls) love the U.S. and fully support our sanctions. Pat Buchanan is simply repulsive. What a hate-filled man.
As our manufacturing base packs up and disappears to China, and multitudes of Chinese are scurrying around America with no monitoring of their activities whatsoever, you have to wonder what the hell we are doing.
We need to expand our military, but to send troops overseas to fight our enemies.
China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia continue to be enemies.
When Pat says "somethings got to give," I must agree. Shoveling billions into Africa as well as troops is foolhardy.
The ability of the GOP, and specifically, believing Christians, to chase Pat Buchanan and his followers out of the party, are the #1 reason why the GOP has been gaining more and more ground on Democrats since 1992 (when Pat was scaring everyone in the middle and center right away from our party). I am as conservative a person as you will find, but I understand that in politics it is better to take something than to give away everything as Pat would rather do. Although, now that he is every bit as radically anti-war as the fringe Left and lock-step in line with the AFL-CIO ultraleft on commerce and trade, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't rather have the Democrats win back the White House in '04 anyway.
Do you support nuking China?
Isn't this the guy who thinks we should impose trade barriers on all manufactured goods coming into the United States? Pat, I've got news for you. Trade barriers are a form of sanctions. Why aren't you concerned about the suffering that would cause?
I agree. I used to be a fan and have appreciated some things he's done for conservatives when no one else would. But he is years beyond making any sense and has turned into everything his attackers said he was (when at the time they said it, they were wrong; they're not now).
Of course. You will never hear Pat and his ultra-leftist fellow parade marchers at the AFL-CIO complaining about the 200,000 American jobs lost (by one study) to their trade protectionism in 2002. I guess those "little men" don't count.
Oh, the humanity.....
Preemptively, I presume you mean. If we did that as a first-strike measure we'd be doing it too late. Should have done that when MacArthur was in Korea. It would have scared the shi-out of Russia and we wouldn't have been put through decades of communist blackmail that led to Vietnam.
Had we been decisive over 50 years ago, there wouldn't be terrorists killing Americans today.
TR said and did a lot of things that made sense, but his statement that the United States should "speak softly and carry a big stick" was good advice that the weasely politicians and entrenched communist spies in our government didn't follow.
Our congress today is larded with leftists who are gleefully pursing a globalist solution to the world's problems that will result in our nation being reduced to (not third world) but second class status. This will make it easier to fold us into the New World Order that we hear so much about today, but twenty years ago would consider the persons who uttered such a term to be anti-USA.
I'm just asking... do you support nuking China? If you were President today, and had your finger on the Go button, would you send our planes up to nuke China?
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