A refocused perspective after losing it all

It was the day of Thanksgiving when the national guard agreed to escort me to my family home, and as I looked around at the crumbled remnants of the walls, the brown earth seeping through the water cracked floor, the jagged glass clutching to the window pane, I knew I had never truly realized how much I had to be thankful for.
    Three weeks ago hurricane Sandy swept mercilessly across the East Coast, and it took my town with it. The ocean breached and even crumbled parts of the sea wall, bringing a devastating 15 feet of water into the nearby streets, houses, and businesses. Returning home this weekend, the sight was truly post apocalyptic. All of the stores and restaurants were boarded shut, army and national guard tanks and tents were stationed everywhere, and the streets were littered mountains of garbage sometimes hundreds of feet high.
    The water was unforgiving in its destruction. The foundation of our home deteriorated, and the majority of my family’s belongings were carried out to sea. Everything from our furniture to family photos, things we simply never imagined being forced to part with, had so quickly become one with the earth from which they came. It was an incredible manifestation of Locke’s conceptualization of property in his Second Treatise. While he defends property as an essential right, he makes clear that it is no more than a social contract. Property is not possession, but simply a claim of one’s right to continued and exclusive use of an object. He remains keenly aware of the fact that each and every piece of property was taken, in some capacity, from nature’s provided resources. While we may assert our continued right to use an object over other people, no piece of property can ever be permanently claimed from nature. Just “as [our things] are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature,” the same unpredictable forces can take our property that we so naively thought to be untouchable.

    While our claim to property had never seemed to weak, our sense of human connection never seemed so strong. Neighbors that were previously distant strangers, some even unfriendly, became reliable sources of help and emotional support. It was a touching display of the strength of united human spirit, something that Rousseau advocated in his Discourse on Human Inequality. In Rousseau’s description of the evolution of the civilized man, he illustrates the origin of society through the organization of men into their huts. This structure of cohabitation fostered social interaction between people as people as they got to know their neighbors and built relationships with them. He claims this “nascent society” was the social golden age, as human relationships were soon after spoiled by financial inequality and subsequent jealousy. As Professor Lavaque-Manty stated in class, Rousseau truly believed that society’s biggest problem was this evolution of selfishness. For him, the independence, happiness, and equality of people were far more important than any physical acquisition of goods that we so often focus on. In this rare moment, stripped of their physical possessions, members of our community were violently removed from their own self-absorption. They instead took the time to strengthen the relationships with those around them, finding it hard to believe anything else had ever really mattered.