A look back and forward

It's late last night as I write this. (Notice how a blog can shift time as it sees fit?)

So much is on everyone's mind these days. The 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is today, and curiously, September 11, 2001 was a beautiful sunny day, just like the weather has been here in the mid-Atlantic for the past few days.

But sadly, the weather in other parts of America has been far short of stellar. Western wildfires, the ebbing waters of Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and the current unspeakable, unthinkable damage in Florida from Hurricane Irma.

The 2001 calamity was stunning for the loss of lives, and these current cataclysms will take some lives with them, and certainly billions of dollars in property. And worse, the loss for many people of all they owned, from family photos to houses to hopes and dreams and confidence in the future.

We as a nation have a great ability to get back to our feet, dust ourselves off and walk on. I have to feel that help will arrive in Texas and Florida and the other states awash in loss and misery down South, and things will get back close to something like normal...someday.  Not soon.

But it was predictable that people in Florida would take advantage of the situation down there, breaking into stores and ripping them off. My feelings about law and order are quite plain. I don't like it when laws are broken, at all.

But when TV news crews are out getting video of the looting, and people race to put those images on Facebook as evidence of the evil in society, I can only think of one thing, and that is how interesting it would be if there could be video of investment bankers looting pension funds with total impunity.

You won't see that on the local news, because that sort of looting takes place in well-appointed boardrooms in office buildings we never get to see.

We can be better. All of us. Not just the petty thieves, but all. Just think of the national amity that 9/11/01 brought on. We were kind.