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“The Day After Hurricane Sandy”

Authors:

n/a

Published:

An exceptional review of the personal and political aftermath of the recent superstorm, written by the inimitable Nicholas Powers of  New York City’s Indypendent newspaper:  http://www.indypendent.org/2012/11/18/day-after-hurricane-sandy.

Some excerpts:

New Yorkers solemnly nodded when told about Gotham’s climate refugees. They were victims whose homelessness was not their fault. But beneath the sympathy were long lines of angry people at gas stations, angry apartment dwellers who ate cold food in the dark, families piled on top of each other in small rooms. The city’s nerves were frayed. . . They weren’t asking for what they wanted, they were asking for what they needed — water, food, medicine. Bloomberg’s condescending rhetoric repeated the sliding scale of dehumanization that is the tactic of the ruling class.

… Our capitalism. It churns like a hurricane across national boundaries. It freezes nature under the sign of commodity. It forces hungry peasants into the city, where it sifts them for the lowest wage for the longest hours. It lifts up a bourgeoisie, who in turn hire the media to unleash a cascade of ideology that saturates the people. But if workers organize and demand higher wages, capitalism spirals up and away to another place with hungrier people. Left in its wake are men and women who sell their bodies, beg on street corners, who dream of what they can’t have, who want things.

… Looking out the window, I imagined what it would look like if we could tax the wealthy and use their money to hire everyone on my block to green our homes. Would trees be planted on sidewalks? Would dust rise as construction crews laid down porous streets? Would the out-of-work-guys come back with hard hats after building a sea wall in Staten Island?

Is it possible to connect our vision of tomorrow with people’s hope rather than fear? My Mom yelled from the bedroom, “Hey did you hear about what they’re doing in Red Hook?”

“No,” I said.

“That Occupy group is giving supplies to people,” she said, “Reminds me of what we did in the ’60s.”