Unsettledness surrounds us
Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite
We really didn’t need Isaias, did we? Not at this time. Not with everything else that’s going on.
It’s been tough enough dealing with all the other uncertainty and fragility in our lives without having to weather a tropical storm.
The coronavirus, of course, lingers and lurks, tamped down in our region for now but capable of breaking out and running wild again, as we’ve seen in other places, meaning our vigilance must not waver. The business landscape is changing, with familiar names drifting away and new ones vanishing in the night, every one of them someone’s dream that now has died. Schools are about to reopen, or not. People are about to go back to work, or not. Federal aid is about to be restored, or not. Someone is about to get a lifeline, or not. We’re about to hold a free, fair, unrigged and uninfluenced election, or not.
Our changing climate is continuing to wreak havoc across the nation and around the world in one form or another, the evidence in rain and fire and people on the move from one region to another. We’re marking the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years later, and that incomprehensible loss of life, and it reminds us that the current fraying of long-standing arms control treaties means the ever more likely ratcheting of tensions with Russia, and now, China, and the return of fears we really haven’t had to confront for years.
Our nation might be on the cusp of generational change on health care, criminal justice, the environment and more. And all of it is taking place against the backdrop of a presidential campaign that will, at least from one side, try to turn us on one another and drive us further apart.
Into all that came Isaias, swift but surly and with a knockout punch. And now comes a prediction from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that a whole bunch more storms could be on the way, possibly a record number for an Atlantic hurricane season given that Isaias was the earliest ninth-named storm on record, so many that the agency might run out of names and have to resort to the Greek alphabet. That would start with Hurricane Alpha, which sounds like a real beast. Let’s hope we don’t get to Omega.
On the bright side, we haven’t had to deal with plagues of frogs, boils or locusts. Yet.
But what to do about the anxiety that gnaws at the gut? We can get the trees removed from our roofs and find a new favorite restaurant or cute little shop and tune out the politics part of the TV news, but that’s not enough to make the uneasiness go away. We can recognize the constancy of change throughout human history and understand that this partly is that, though in abundance. We can revel with our loved ones and immerse ourselves in our avocations. And we can continue to focus, as we always do, on the things we can count on and the things we can control.
The aftermath of Isaias convinces me that we will get through all this. You could see it in the way neighbors helped neighbors, like we always do, with a plug in a generator, an extension cord from a house, some space in a freezer, a cup of coffee, or the offer of a chain saw or a rake or just a pair of hands. Our foundation is strong, even if we have to replace the siding.
We won’t come out of this the same as we went in, but that’s OK. That, in fact, is the point. We’ll get rocked a little, maybe a lot, and we will change, but we’ll be alright.
Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
