I was listening the other day to a Terry Gross interview with the writer Joseph O'Neill, whose acclaimed novel "Netherland" is set in NYC in the days and weeks after 9/11. O'Neill and his wife lived in New York at that time. He told Gross that it was a period in which everybody was thrown off-balance, and nobody could be sure what was coming next, or be sure of their judgment. O'Neill said something about how difficult it is to read the signs of the times. You don't want to be panicked into doing something stupid, but you don't want to be European Jews of the 1930s, who told themselves that everything was going to be okay if they just sat tight and waited for the storm to pass.
O'Neill's remarks brought back how unnerving those days living in New York were, for precisely that reason. I remember having coffee with a banker on the East Side a month or so after 9/11. We were talking calmly about what routes we'd take with our families out of the city if a suitcase nuke went off, presuming we survived the blast. Just insane talk, really insane. But those conversations happened a lot then. People really didn't know if 9/11 was a one-off thing, or if something as bad or worse was coming any day.
It's easy today to laugh at New Yorkers (and Washingtonians) back then, and to laugh at ourselves for our anxiety, but it was very, very real, and its only in retrospect, because nothing did happen, that we can find humor, more or less, in all that fear. The question that remains, and that O'Neill hit on in his interview, is this: How can we know when we're irrationally panicking in such situations? Which is to say: How can we be prudent, being neither head-for-the-hills loonies, nor complacent optimists in denial about the true danger we'd be in for staying?
I don't think there is a general formula here, but I'm interested to hear how you think about such things.
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>How would you prepare for the utilities being off for several days (electricity, water, gas)?
Generator, stored water, propane camp stove
>How would you prepare for being temporarily out of work?
Live off savings and take a temporary job at the chicken processing plant or some such.
>How would you prepare for flooding,
Not really an issue where I live
>or rioting,
Not so much an issue where I live - population 637, but I have a cache of shotguns and rifles with enough ammo to deter any likely rioters
>or a pandemic?
Stay out of cities, avoid groups of people
I think you can come up with a formula for rationally preparing for possible future crises.
My math skills are rusty, but the formula would weigh the probability of a given crisis occurring within a specified time period, and the potential personal cost of such a crisis, versus the cost and effectiveness of a proposed preparation.
So: The odds that a given household will experience a sustained disruption in utilities during a given year is low but not vanishingly so. The "cost" of such a disruption will vary by household but could be high. The cost of preparing for such a disruption with food stores, a generator, etc, is low, and the effectiveness high. Thus preparing for a utility disruption is prudent and rational.
On the other hand, moving to North Dakota from New York City to escape future starvation brought on by Peak Oil or Global Climate Change does not pass the rationality test. If you like human culture, have a good job, and enjoy NYC the costs of such a move are enormous, and you start paying them immediately. The probability of a starvation crisis in the short-term is vanishingly low. The effectiveness of moving to North Dakota is extremely doubtful: any catastrophe severe enough to devastate New York will have global consequences, and it is unclear how much you will improve your life expectancy by moving to a rural locale.
Of course: The whole calculation changes if you are depressed living in NYC, despise your fellow citizens for not sharing your values, don't have a good job or one you enjoy, and feel disenfranchised. In such cases the cost of moving to North Dakota are small or nonexistent. For psychological reasons a person moving from NYC to ND may need to attribute the move to a desire to avert a looming disaster. But what really motivates the move is the low value the person assigns to living in NYC.
Very interesting comment by O'Neill considering that he and his family left the Chelsea Hotel and Manhattan shortly after 9/11. He was also quoted in the press as saying "Game Over" whatever that means.
I was in Canada, camping on Lake Superior, when 9-11 happened. Indeed, I didn't find out about it until the next day. Because of where I was I think I missed out on a great deal of irrational hysteria that plagued the US, and was fanned by our media and perhaps by our politicians. The Canadians were certainly not unaffacted by the event: they lost people that day too, and Canadian airspace was closed for a week. But the reaction there was one of shock and horror (of course) followed not by paranoia but by a terrible sadness. As I drove across Ontario, to Sudbury and then down to Toronto, there were signs reading God Bless America in the samll towns, and here and there American flags were flying. In a strangely quiet Toronto the American consulate was under siege by mountains of flowers. It never occured to me in Canada, and I never heard anyone suggest, that more attacks might be imminent. It seemed almost staringly obvious that if Al Qaida had anything else up their sleeve they would have shot that bolt on 9-11 too. Perhaps if the US had taken the time to mourn and grieve first, our reaction would have been more rational.
One other thing too: when I came back to the US I first thought George Bush's poll numbers would be in the dumper, given his panicky flying hither and thither that day, rather than taking bold public command of the situation as one would have expected. Was his rout not reported here? I still have trouble believing that he got away with such rank cowardice. (Yes, someone will come back at me for that, but I'm calling it like I see it.)
Was his rout not reported here? I still have trouble believing that he got away with such rank cowardice.
If I recall correctly, Bush was unfavorably compared to Giuliani who seemed to take charge of the local situation in NYC.
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