Right Decision to Cancel the New York City Marathon!

Dear Commons Community,

You will hear a lot this weekend about the decision to cancel the New York City Marathon.  Given the devastating affects of Hurricane Sandy this week, questions were legitimately raised as to whether New York should be celebrating all its glory as well as deploying precious resources to this annual event.   My first thoughts on this were that the “show” should go on but I changed my mind thinking about how many people are hurting right now because they lost loved ones, property and parts of their lives.

George Vecsey has a fine piece in today’s New York Times exploring the decision to cancel the marathon.  His conclusion:

“The best barometer of the inappropriateness of a marathon on Sunday was the discomfort expressed by runners themselves. Finely tuned competitors, whether of the championship or the plodder variety, knew in their bones and their nerve endings and their hearts that it would be wrong to prance through a stricken city.

These affected athletes were way ahead of city and marathon officials who dithered for days, talking of the glory of this grand annual event, and the theoretical benefits to revenue and morale.

The idea of diverting energy, human and actual, to create that special one-day universe was suddenly passé, for this week, for this town. People had drowned or been crushed by trees or electrocuted all over the city, and in New Jersey and Long Island and Connecticut.”

Amen and we move on!

Tony