Lesson to be learned

Typhoon highlights fragile infrastructure

Sometimes, I think, we forget just how precarious our lives are. I would hope that storms like Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan would be reminders that would bring us back to reality.

No, I am not talking about global warming or climate change (anthropomorphological), but the simple fact that natural events on earth are far more powerful than us humans. We seem to forget that.

It is tragic (and whatever else you want to use to describe terrible, horrible, unimaginable) what happened in the Philippines when the typhoon hit. I am not saying anything to diminish that.

But I will bet that the earth has seen larger events and will so again … it is just that humans were not in a position to record or measure them in the past.

Still, that is not my point. My point is how close we are, even in the US and other developed countries, to seeing the trappings of civilization stripped away from us.

Folks, no matter where you live, you are only hours (or minutes and definitely only days) away from reverting to a world that resembles one that only the most primitive societies left on the planet can conceive.

To me it is a terrifying thought, not that I spend much time worrying about it. Still, stop and think what life in North America would be like if the power went off for more than a few days. Think of the chaos, the mayhem, the struggles that we would face as we tried to reconfigure our world.

In microcosms, the impact of Sandy, Katrina, Ike, and now Haiyan give us inklings of what we might face.

For those whose memory does not stretch back beyond 1989, that is what those of us who did live through the years 1946 to 1989 faced in the nightmares of the world we were in. Unfortunately, while that particular threat has receded, it is not gone and could return in new and different forms.

I think most people are content to ignore that reality that Nature and our own folly can overturn practically in an instant the last 500 years of progress in the world.

It is not a thought that should consume us, but it is something that we should remember … and if nothing else, be thankful for the shoulders of the people who raised us to the level that we currently living on and realize that we are teetering on such a thin veneer of civilization.

I guess, in a way, it is a way to tell people that we need to be ready to assume total responsibility for our own existences, if we haven’t already, and think about how we can preserve what we have and that which is around us. The infrastructure that we expect from government to provide for us really is so fragile … and most likely in a crisis will be inadequate.

Just a little food for thought there.