No.

A hurricane hit Brooklyn dead on, and the damage we suffered was pretty minimal. Anytime you can say that, you are lucky. Brooklyn (and all of New York City) was very lucky.

We planned well and were very well prepared, but at the end of the day, we were very lucky.

Huge swaths of upstate New York, New Jersey and Vermont were very unlucky.

We have ways of dealing with such bad luck. One such way is to declare the affected areas a disaster zone and the Federal government puts money towards alleviating the disaster conditions. The fact that Brooklyn was not declared a disaster area does not mean that we were screwed. It means that we were lucky. I’m as much of a Brooklyn booster as the next person, but let’s just count our blessings and move on.

To review, Brooklyn is not a disaster area.

Upstate NY is a disaster area.

No matter how many sidewalk tree pits in Brooklyn were affected, we should not be clamoring for disaster-zone declarations. We should be thanking our lucky stars that a hurricane hit us dead on and caused so little damage, and then we should be opening up our hearts and wallets to fellow New Yorkers upstate and fellow Americans throughout New Jersey and New England.

A lot of us were lucky, some of us weren’t. Let’s help the people who weren’t and stop trying to score political points – local or national – off of other people’s misfortune.