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By Karen S. Peterson and Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY
The nation's worst blackout generated not the "night of terror" that followed a lesser blackout in New York in 1977, but a moment in which strangers became allies.
Like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Americans depended upon the kindness of strangers. In city after city, people offered help to those they did not know. In New York, some risked life and limb to direct traffic when stoplights were paralyzed. Stores passed out free milk rather than allow it to spoil in the heat. Hotels passed out bedding to folks sleeping on the street. Mayor Michael Bloomberg politely declined Gov. George Pataki's offer to deploy the National Guard. Detroit mayor Kwame Kirkpatrick said he believed the city was "the calmest of all the cities that have been hit by this crisis." It seems, say researchers who study America's psyche, that the country learned something profound from terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. "Someone noted that the terrorists hoped after 9/11 they had changed America forever, and they were right," says Paul Kettl, professor of psychiatry at Pennsylvania State University. "They did." After 9/11 there was a "growing feeling that people needed to hang together to take care of each other." Charles Figley, who researches post-traumatic stress disorder at Florida State University, was caught in the power failure while on a train that had just left New York's Penn Station for Morristown, N.J. "Passengers immediately began to talk about 9/11. We got into that spirit, and appreciated how lucky we were" not to be in the middle of another terrorist horror. Figley describes their relief as "post-traumatic euphoria" and says their relief "enabled them to activate that part of themselves that wants to help others." America also has changed since the last major blackout swept the northeast two decades ago. In New York alone, the disruption that former New York Mayor Abe Beame called "a night of terror" generated 3,000 arrests and $300 million in damages. In those days, New York's crime rate was soaring — a trend that would last until 1993, when former Major Rudolph Guiliani and then Police Commissioner William Bratton launched "Zero Tolerance" policing, says Jack Levin of Boston's Northeastern University. "If the blackout had occurred in 1991," Levin says, "young people in New York would have rioted. But the crime rate in New York has plummeted since 1993." A study of the '77 blackout by researchers at three New York institutions, including Columbia University, linked looting to an incendiary mix of poverty, unemployment, mistrust of the justice system and other grievances. James Sparrow, director of the Blackout History Project at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., notes that the same grievances still exist in many neighborhoods. "It's really telling that we haven't seen looting and rioting. It's deeply significant," he says. Sparrow says another peaceful Rust Belt blackout that occurred in 1965 may help explain why. It occurred during the Cold War, another time when Americans felt themselves under threat. "Americans in general are in a state of mind that's much closer to the Cold War," he says. "There's a sense of community that wasn't there in the '70s, and a greater respect for authority. "And I wouldn't underestimate the fear factor." Contributing: David Kiley in Detroit |
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