I predicted Huricane Sandy...

Ok Fine not really but I did get paranoid about it long before last week when everyone else started.  In fact I started not long after Huricane Katrina six or seven years ago.  Here it is in a paper I wrote for College:

With the recent flooding and devastation in the mid-west, and the memory of the Christmas 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina still fresh in everyone’s mind (and in the case of Katrina-the destruction remains) the issue of a numbing effect has come up.

Horror and destruction occurs and we all feel sad for the victims. We send our money and watch as celebrities talk on TV shows of the atrocious conditions that the people face. The event happens and we kind of move on, wanting the news to stop covering it because we have mourned enough. Let me explain that this is obviously not the case if a person has loved ones who were affected or said person has a special connection with the destroyed place. I’m talking mostly of the general public who sees strangers when they look at the devastation. These are not bad people, mind you, they have a heart for their fellow man but they prefer to consume themselves more with their own lives and their own surrounding. This is a rather normal thing.

Then I began to think what if something was to happen to New York again. After 9/11 the government, both local and national, has claimed that they have done a lot to insure our safety and prevent a repeat of the events of that horrific day. While there is some debate if this statement is indeed true, I will not go into the nation’s terrorism policies at this time.

What I will say, is that the major difference between 9/11 and the other events is that 2001 was man-made destruction while the others are cause by nature and as the levees have taught us, cannot be prevented by human measures. So what would happen if nature caused havoc visible in our back yard instead of on the TV?

Manhattan is an island and beyond that a rather small island, filled with a huge number of people. If there were a tsunami or hurricane here, and I understand that it isn’t likely but for arguments sake if, there is almost a guarantee that the entire place would be enveloped by water. Can you imagine the amount of people that would die?

Not to mention the conditions that would occur after it. The water would be deadly. We wouldn’t be able to drink water except from bottles, many of us would lose family and friends, if not be victims ourselves.

This is not very likely to happen, though nothing is absolute, but I urge everyone who changes the channel or skips the hurricane coverage in the news papers to think about how you would feel if those nameless strangers were instead your mother or father, or neighbors because in the end we are all neighbors. This Earth belongs to all of us and we are all in this life together.

We all know the answers to those questions now...