"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the
world more than anything written after the events of that day."
Robert Stone

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November 4, 2012

The Echoes in Sandy's Winds and Water

A vulnerable downtown Manhattan....Ravaged neighborhoods plunged into darkness... Scenes of tangled wreckage... Valorous public officials stepping up and pulling together to help the shocked, the grieving... And, finally, so many innocents, lost by the score.

The tragic echoes of September 11 were everywhere in evidence this week in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, even though this latest disaster had not been the result of the darker forces in global ideology and human nature but of nature itself, albeit natural forces that were multiplied in impact by decades of human ignorance, greed, and neglect toward climate change.

What's more, the great deluge of 2012 did not spare those areas most hard hit by the World Trade Center attacks. Neighborhoods that had lost loved ones, disproportionately, in 2001--notably those on Staten Island and throughout New Jersey--were again besieged. Floodwaters poured into the Ground Zero site. And the National September 11 Memorial Museum itself, as described in this New York Times story, withstood serious damage.

Through it all, Sandy's silver lining--if one dare call it that--will, given time, prove to be similar to the one that shone through eleven years ago: the resilience of survivors and public servants in the face of epic calamity.

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