Lessons in the Gas Lines following Super Storm Sandy Part III

Lessons in the Gas Lines 

following Super Storm Sandy

Part III

Citizens in the United States could learn a lot from Third World neighbors in the global village.  Though these nations are developing in terms of manufacturing, gross national product and other economic indicators, they appear rich in familial, relational and other human resources.  During the last decade of the twentieth century coinciding with the years of the Clinton Administration, Americans experienced unequaled economic prosperity.  The New York Stock Exchange broke ten thousand and sustained that considerable growth for months; the rate of return on investments approximated an average of fifteen percent.  Average Americans per capita individually owned more materially than at any other point in human history.  By the end of the twentieth century, the United States had become home to more than forty thousand (40,000) stand alone storage units.  That mind boggling figure excludes the possessions that Americans have in closets, attics, basements, garages and car trunks.  Quite possibly, Americans store more items than people in Third World countries actually own.  This propensity to acquire more items for its sake and store them created a competitive market of garage and yard sales and auctioning of storage lockers throughout the country.  Perhaps, global neighbors in developing countries could help Americans curb their ferocious and insatiable economic appetites and reorder their priorities. 

One Saturday morning during the weeks of gas shortage, I walked two blocks from my house to a station where people had stood in line over night anticipating a delivery.  An adjacent McDonald’s franchise undoubtedly exceeded its sales goals as the street garbage cans overflowed with their coffee cups, food containers and bags.  Each day possibly earned a week’s worth of normal sales projections as Super Storm Sandy imported an impromptu captive, large and lingering market.  As people waited endlessly in the long gas lines, hunger and the cold forced them into McDonald’s.  Beyond marveling over the incredible amount of fast food that people in line consumed, I was delighted to stumble serendipitously upon an overnight conversation and debate on religion.  A clergy colleague and contemporary in seminary had spent the night in line and participated thoroughly in the discussion.  He holds a doctorate in Modern and American Religious History; yet he possesses the uncanny ability to resist pedantic airs and fully respect laypersons in heated debates about politics and religion.  Beginning with ancient Egyptian civilization and indigenous African religions, the conversation participants traversed the complex, intriguing and provocative terrain of the development of formal belief systems and religious institutions. 

They traveled from East to West surveying origins of Buddhism, Hinduism and the History, Religion and Literature of Israel.  At my arrival with a couple of gas cans circa 8:00am, they had sped through centuries; chronologically, they began in 10,000 BCE.  As I assumed my place in line, they had arrived in Rome following the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s CE.  One gentleman whose physical strength, mental acumen and ideological resolve did not waver despite hours of exposure to natural winter elements took the crowd to task about the rogue and reprehensible actions of Protestant Christendom.  He demanded all Protestants, clergy and laity, immediately and irreversibly repent of their wickedness and the error of their ways by rejoining the “one true Church,” the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  This gentleman’s words reverberated forcefully in the conversation because his remarks reiterated Pope Benedict XVI’s similar position articulated in the first year of his papacy.  Eventually, everyone recovered from the shock of such a wholesale indictment of four hundred and fifty divergent strands of Protestant Christianity,

The conversation turned toward recent financial, sexual, political and moral scandals of Protestant clergy.  As an African American clergyperson with twenty-six years of professional experience, I felt compelled to ask the crowd to resist the easy temptation of depicting my colleagues with broad brushstrokes which result quickly from incendiary and inflammatory news accounts pertaining to atypical pastors at mega churches who lust for celebrity and fortune.  My valiant efforts proved futile in response to the understandable and entrenched cynicism relating to clergy within any of the five major faiths.  That iceberg floating in the ocean of public discourse is much wider and deeper than I suspect.  Nonetheless, I then recalled the event that was to begin at the church within in the next hour.  Regrettably, I had to leave.  Still, I marveled about the depth and breadth of that theological and historical seminar in a gas line.  Genuinely, the qualitative exchange of ideas and penetrating questions paralleled graduate school courses.  The aftermath of Super Storm Sandy yielded joys, mysteries and experiences that many of us would not have had otherwise.  Again, that natural disaster unearthed the best and worst of human character.

In the first gas line in which I stood, I learned that an owner of a home improvement company brokered a deal with the station owner.  The home improvement business owned two huge generators that had the capacity to operate two gas tanks and the station’s store.  Whereas the station owner had generators, they were not powerful enough to enable him to sell gas.  With the contingency that he be allowed to commandeer one side of one tank for his business vans and the private vehicles of his employees, the home improvement owner loaned the gas station owner the two generators.  This deal positioned both men and their businesses to maintain operations during the month immediately following the storm when many other enterprises suffered tremendous losses because of the fuel shortage.  As versions of this story seeped through the crowd, many of us became grateful to these anonymous men whose mutually beneficial business deal afforded us an opportunity to care for our families and attend to daily professional and personal demands. 

However, one woman complained incessantly through the hours she stood in line about how unfair it was that the home improvement personnel received special treatment.  Along with other persons in line, I appealed to her to be pragmatic and consider that their boss’s generosity however personally and economically motivated still resulted in favorable actions for us.  Had not the deal been brokered, then there would have been one less gas station open.  The potential loss of that one station would have significantly exacerbated the gas shortage.  All of us would have experienced even greater hardships as would the people we love at home and serve at work.  Incredulously, our appeals to this woman fell on infertile mental and emotional ground.  Within interims of ten to fifteen minutes coinciding with the arrival and departure of the home improvement vans, she restated her objections about the lack of fairness.  The self-centered nature of her shameless grumbling became most evident for anyone continuing to listen.  Many of us simply began to ignore her as she lacked the capacity to look beyond her personal needs and appreciate the good deed that the business produced even if it were not fair fundamentally.  What is?  Her recalcitrance and unwillingness to consider the collective needs of everyone in line and the fact that this deal presented a perfect but albeit human opportunity to meet those needs exposed the pungent and repulsive stench of indifference with which many people respond to this historic natural disaster that adversely affected and effected countless millions of American citizens.