The Fates: A tale of two coasts

Today is Halloween on both the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States. Millions of children on both ends of the country will be arriving at school in full costume regalia, prepared for parties, parades, and cheerful pandemonium. There is a major difference, however, between the events that will be unfolding in two specific locations on these two coasts.

In the San Francisco Bay Area on the West Coast, hundreds of thousands of children will be going to school in costume, while some hundreds amongs those thousands will be playing hookey, with their parents’ permissions, in order to stand on Market Street in The City and be part of the spectacle and ticker-tape parade celebrating the World Series winning San Francisco Giants.

In the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area on the East Coast and beyond, however, millions of people will spend this same day not celebrating at all. Instead they will be enduring another day without power or heat, only venturing out for food as needed from darkened shops, while having to slog through mud, sand, and the shattered remnants of their communities to do so.

If you have ever thought life is not fair, today is the best day to embrace that idea, because the brutal truth is that this week in particular, The Fates have not played fair with the lives of millions of Americans. As exciting as it may be to be a native of San Francisco today, between celebrating the Orange and Black of Halloween and the Orange and Black of the Giants’ World Series, it is not possible to ignore the suffering, devestation, loss of life, and crushing economic impact of the wind, rain, storm surge, and flooding that Hurricane Sandy has caused in the east of the country, astonishingly shutting down a critical swath of one of the most important nodes of commerce in North America and the world.

I hope if you live in any of the areas that has suffered damage from the hurricane that your services and circumstances will improve as quickly as possible. I hope that you know that even though this is a day of festivities and fun here in the Bay Area, that our thoughts are still with you. We know that we are linked together here in the 21st century, not just by all of the tools of the Internet Age, but by our common destiny and our shared sense of humanity. Best wishes for a speedy recovery to all of you.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2012 at 7:44 am. 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.