When I was 18, a blizzard struck Denver just before Christmas. It was an amazing storm, the largest snowfall the city had seen since 1913.
The city, hushed in a blanket of white, was more or less paralyzed through the holiday. But as such storms will do, it crystallized in our memories as an equalizer of the city's people, who shared an extra measure of assistance and cheer with their friends and neighbors. When natural events suspend the awesome expressions of kinetic power and habit in the daily life of a modern city, we remember them not just because they are rare, but because they up-end our behavior and impel greater degrees of mutual reliance and protection.
As the holiday ended and New Year's approached, city life did not recover quickly. Denver's team of city plows lay under-organized and under-utilized in the weeks following the storm. Huge ruts of ice gathered on city throughways. Fender-benders and more severe accidents multiplied, and the daily commute permanently damaged the cars of many thousands of people (and if you didn't have a car in Denver in the early '80s, good luck with that).
City Hall, run by Mayor Bill McNichols, grew defensive over the mounting frustration of the city's residents. Instead of heeding the anger and redoubling the city's efforts to free the city from the ice, he failed to re-organize the response of the plows, and even as important, failed to acknowledge that the city's response was coming up short and to promise a better response next time.
That May, a young politician named Federico Peña upset Bill McNichols to become Denver's first Latino mayor. There was much that was appealing about Peña's call to "Imagine a Great City." But the single issue that galvanized voters to reject McNichols, more than any other after 14 years in office, was his failure to clear the streets of ice after the Christmas blizzard.
The moral of this story is -- the way executive office-holders respond to and mitigate natural calamities, both man-made and climatological, serve as almost primal indicators to citizens of their capacity to govern. In democracies, voters will punish office-holders who demonstrate indecision, inattention, ineffectiveness and duplicity in response to a crisis.
Large-scale crises are long-lasting signposts of our lives that lead us back through the maze of our experience, to show us why we think what we do and what lessons we've learned. They make up the inherently visual, "where-were-you-when" moments that have the power to adjust not just individual but mass psychology and opinion. The skill and alacrity with which people in power respond to these crises impacts on both individual and collective long-term memory.
The ongoing oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is such a crisis. It is our largest such crisis, it is appallingly visual, it will directly impact millions of people, and it will be with us for a long time. Accordingly, the memories and opinions we are all forming of the Obama administration's evolving response to this crisis will be lasting and personal, they will be reflected at the polls, and they will become part of our national lore.