It’s natural to think a problem is solved when your problem is solved. For instance, when you get a new job, “the recession is over!” I got to observe this pattern in myself when I got my power restored after a 4-day outage that followed the most damaging ice storm in my county’s history. With power on, I had to turn my attention to getting my house working again. At that point 1/8 of the county was still without power. As of this morning, the outage rate had fallen to 1 in 250, but that is a lot of people. It took 6 days to restore the electric lines to the level of trouble that people gripe about after a more typical severe summer thunderstorm.
There is a big difference among people in the way they view a crisis depending on the random chance of their own experience. If you talk to those who were most affected and those who were least affected, you hear the two sides of the story. People who never lost power may already have forgotten that the storm happened. Those still waiting for the lights to come back may understandably see the storm as one of the defining events of the year.
