Calm down dear...it's only a hurricane

Michael Winner is one of those people you love to hate. His restaurant reviews leave me thankful that he never (as far as I know) was a guest at one of my restaurants, but he has given us the "Calm down, it's only ..." catch-phrase that reached as far as parliament at Prime Minister's Question Time. It's very British to calm down demonstrate sang froid in the face of crisis, and when I was in Rhode Island last month on the day Hurricane Sandy arrived, my attitude was very much that people were over-reacting and the journalists were out trying to drum up a story.

New York: October 29th 2012

In Rhode Island, my son and I went out for a curry (how very British!) and ran between the showers. Less than a couple of hundred miles to the South in New York, it was a very different picture. The  hurricane took a formidable toll: 7.5 million people without power for several days, 16,000 flights cancelled, an economic cost of around $10/20 billion -and a death toll approaching 100. 
Wall Street was closed, the United Nations was closed and one of the world's great cities was forced to remember that it is also a coastal location.

Living through Hurricane Sandy, I now realise how easy it is to be totally isolated from what is going on around you and oblivious of the reality of human tragedy as it unfolds. Without television news and without all the infrastructure of modern communications,   people in Rhode Island or other neighbouring areas would have been totally oblivious to  the devastation faced around New York. Without "news" life just goes on.

It's no exaggeration to say that the constant flow of news and information changes the course of history. The other distraction in Fall in New England was the Presidential election. Behind the hype, hysteria and massive media spend there lay a fascinating statistic:

2012 Presidential election, distribution of votes by race and gender - source CNN

The people who tried to stop Obama returning to the White House were white men. Without the female, the Latino, the African/American and native American voters, America would be a virtual dictatorship.

Look at the map and the numbers. Just how does that make you feel...? 

Calm down, dear, it's only the most powerful nation on Earth.