We did not lose power as a result of last night’s storm and high winds. You can bet I am suitably grateful about that. We had a perfectly boring, rather retro suburban dinner planned and I was able to cook it without any difficulties.
It used to be that a good deal of Columbia felt insulated from power outages due to our lines being underground. That hasn’t been as true in recent years, or, maybe I’m imagining things. That being said, I’ve certainly observed a fair amount of smugness over the years from the Columbia contingent when the topic of power outages comes up.
So I went to bed feeling grateful that the power outage gods had passed over us and this morning I woke up feeling like an idiot. I’ll tell you why.
Last night I saw post after post from folks looking for restaurants that hadn’t been impacted by the power outage. Eat in, carry out, delivery - - you name it. Sadly, there were plenty of posts from restaurants announcing that they’d be closed for the evening due to power loss. My heart hurt for them because I knew they’d be impacted not just by the loss of business but because all of the perishable food they had onsite might be rendered unusable, too.
So something about those inquiries from the public looking for dinner irked me. All of these poor restaurants suffering losses and all they care about is their own personal dinner? They don’t care as long as their own Sunday night dinner plans are accommodated?
When I went online this morning a light dawned : our desperate restaurant seekers didn’t have power, either. Perhaps what they had planned to eat was now an impossibility.
Duh.
How often have I done that? How often do we all do that? We take the information that we have and form an opinion based on our own personal experiences and inclinations. A lot of the time that works for us but sometimes we are very, very wrong.
In this case I kept my short-sighted opinions to myself and my skewed perceptions didn’t harm anyone. But it has really set me to thinking about how much harm is done in our community and even more broadly when people are content to form opinions and act on them with only a limited amount of information, plus: the general resistance (inability?) to rethink once more information becomes available.
Frankly, it creeps me out.
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