JUST THAT ONE BAD DECADE

Recently Traumatized, Coping Yet Again (Robin Givhan and Lynne Duke, August 15, 2003, Washington Post)

The worst place to be was on the subway.

When the power failed in New York and across the Northeast today, subway cars lurched to a sudden halt and the stations turned inky black. The air thickened and passengers sat trapped on trains for as long as two hours, stuck below ground in hot tin cans. The only escape were stairs at the end of a dark dirt- and grease-covered tunnel, the place where the rats live.

When rescue workers and volunteers finally arrived at Josephine Balancer's car, the babysitter guided her two young charges out of the car and into the tunnel, all while carrying her own 15-month-old daughter in a stroller. She had been on the Broadway local, deep under midtown Manhattan, headed uptown to the Bronx. They picked their way along the filthy tunnel on a 15-minute trek to the station at Columbus Circle.

When they emerged into a city without power, they were met by a friendly hot dog vendor bearing bottles of water and paper towels, which they used to wash a thick slick of black grease from their arms and faces.

Late tonight, as some of the thousands of commuters who were stranded tried to sleep on newspapers they had laid out on the streets around Grand Central Station, the city remained gripped by darkness. There were no reports of disturbances amid a heavy police presence in the streets. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said authorities had called in every available police officer to deal with the emergency.

In the first hours of the power outage, across a city that somehow coped with the unthinkable nearly two years ago, people seemed almost happy to show New York's best side once more, under less fearsome conditions. Though traffic lights were out and sweat-soaked pedestrians streamed through the streets, car horns were not leaned on, brakes went unscreeched. When people waved, it was with all five fingers.

Interesting that this represents a return to the rather decent behavior of 1965 and stands in stark contrast to the wretched behavior of 1977. Anyone who wonders why Herb Brooks death mattered need only consider how badly 1970s America needed to know it was redeemable. Anyone who thinks we weren't a better nation before the late '60s and aren't a better nation today than we were by the late '70s need only ponder these examples. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 15, 2003 1:32 PM