Were you there for the "great blackout of 2003"? I was in the DC area. We had power, so we were treated to the constant stream of news about whole cities shutting down. At first I groaned in sympathy for all those folks in northern cities without power. Then I heard some government official exclaim that we were a super power with a third world power grid. I couldn't believe my ears. This guy must never have been to the "third world". Does he not know that millions of people around the world are without power EVERY day of their lives? Does he know that millions more deal with power outages so frequently they become common place? Has he not been listening to the news out of Iraq where people have been without power for a long time?
A single couple day power outage is not fun, as I'm sure that any New Yorker that once again had to walk home in high heal shoes or a Detroiter boiling water would tell me, but we need to wake up to reality. We are living in a country so rich that something like this is inconcievable to us. We are so used to having computers, lights, refridgerators, tap water, subways, cars, etc that we panic when those things become harder to reach. Yet there are millions who face this every day of their life.
Have we become so comfortable in our wealth that we trully have no clue what the rest of the world lives like?