Superstorm Sandy shows why we live in the world’s best place

I’ve always thought we are incredibly blessed to live in Canada – and specifically, in southern Ontario - and the devastation along the U.S. east coast from Superstorm Sandy confirms it.

As the flood waters recede from New York and the New Jersey coastline, life is at a standstill for millions of Americans whose homes have been damaged or destroyed, are without electricity and facing terrible uncertainty.

It seems like the U.S. is devastated each year by a natural disaster (remember the tornadoes in the Midwest last spring?), but for some magical reason, those weather-related catastrophes never seem to find us in the GTA.

On Sunday, the southern Ontario storm forecast called for up to 100 millimetres (about four inches) of rain on Monday night and Tuesday, a staggering total that would surely have cause widespread flooding, damage and misery.

Instead, we got a wind-whipped drizzle that briefly knocked out power to a few thousand homes in the GTA, and a few thousand more across the province.

The lights are back on in most of them by now.

Once again we dodged a bullet headed in our direction, while our friends to the south didn’t.

How many times have we been warned that calamitous weather is on the way, only to wake up to sunshine?

This has been a cold wet autumn, and old-fashioned winter has to return sooner or later, but the weather we enjoyed over the previous 18 months was relentlessly beautiful.

Our standard of living is among the best in the world and our prospects for the future are much better than other industrialized countries.

We have stable government, even if it doesn’t always seem like it, and politicians who are not yet so partisan that they cannot work together on at least the important issues.

When the biggest story in the local news is whether the mayor tried to pull a string to help his high school football team, a lot of places would like to trade their problems for ours.

We’re on a roll of wonderful good luck around here, for whatever reason, and as long as the shooter at our craps table keeps rolling his point number, you can press your bet.

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                  

 

    

 

 

  

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Comments

[RedMarvel]

Agreed, no matter what other polls or surveys say, Toronto is still one of the best places to live. Granted we have our problems but, all in all, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.