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The Boston Globe

Opinion

Juliette kayyem

Pulling the plug on nation’s security

WELCOME BACK, D.C., it’s good to hear from you. By now, hopefully, you and your neighbors in the mid-Atlantic area are back online after last month’s violent storms left about 3 million people in the dark and, with downed power lines and fallen trees, delayed the restoration of power. Since then, to catch you up, Tom Cruise’s Oprah couch-jumping testament to love was put in a new light when Katie Holmes filed for divorce; CNN’s Anderson Cooper came out of the closet to a worldwide yawn; and the nation celebrated its independence from an unresponsive and monopolistic source of power (and it wasn’t the electric utilities).

The ongoing power outages are an epic failure, however, not only for those who suffer in the heat but for the rest of the nation and the world looking on, aghast. That our capital is in the dark is akin to riots in London or debilitating strikes in Paris. It says something about a nation whose projection of strength is an essential part of its security strategy. There is little national power with no power in the nation’s capital.

Comments

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I guess Juliette never heard of backup generators.

She's right!! Look at Old Deerfield MA where the lines are all underground because its a "historic village". It's a dramatic improvement to the eye as well as safer-and proves the point that it can be done.

zmbywoff wrote: "I guess Juliette never heard of backup generators." Yes, that's what every building in the country needs--a backup generator. How big a generator do you think would be necessary so a huge skyscraper office building can keep running? And how much pollution would be generated if every building in a downtown area had a generator running, especially for multiple days while the power companies take their time getting everything turned on?

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Juliette: I'm surprised you missed the easy solution to this and all of our other pressing problems: we'll just bomb those nasty power companies, then invade them, update their infrastructure and create thousands of new jobs for Americans! Look, Iraq can work here--and even better, these power companies really do have weapons of mass destruction! Thanks to my buddy Dick Cheney for the idea!