While this is really off topic, I feel compelled to include this in
the spirit of the holidays that are soon upon us…
Last week Thursday night we had a terrible wind storm
in the Seattle area knocking out power to about 1 million homes.
I spent 5 days without power which for me also means no water.
While that was personally a challenge, I was so incredibly grateful
for the power being on last night when I came home last night.
What is so interesting is the way a natural disaster can affect your
life.  Basically as we learned from Katrina, no one is coming to rescue
you for awhile but even after that I had not taken as many steps as
I could have to be more prepared.  While the workers are making
a tremendous effort, the bottom line is that we just expect to be
rescued by them.  It particularly stuck me when I ventured to
Downtown Seattle yesterday that had barely been touched by
the storm.  Everything was as normal.  It hit me when I saw
a woman in a fur coat draped in shopping bags and having
a stressful conversation on her cell phone about some holiday
thing.  I wondered if she knew there were people still without
power - heat and light- in their homes and may not have
it back until after Christmas.
While there was a great relief effort and some community
support, I was amazed at how people could just go on
with their lives as if nothing happened.
I kept wondering what it would be like if even half of the people
in Seattle had come out with their work clothes on how long would
it take to clean up all of the trees and get the power back on.

I was also started wondering about if this is what people who survived Katrina felt like or what homeless people felt like - forgotten.

How can the world sit by when a family is alone in the dark and the cold?

I also heard the update on how many billions Iraq is costing us which made me further question just what we are doing on the planet.

Well I guess this could be the never ending saga but what comes to mind is the title of a book called “Bowling Alone:The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert D. Putnam .

Are you bowling alone? Are we all bowling alone?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 5:53 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.