NO MONSTERS
On Reason Online, Nick Gillespie considers the unexpected reaction to the blackout:
Remember the old Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," ranked as one of the series' best by those who care about such matters? A minor classic on Cold War hysteria, it takes place on a typical street in a typical American town, where the power goes out for no apparent reason. Within hours, the neighbors are at each other's throats, accusing one another of treachery and worse. As the lights intermittently come back on and the day turns to night, rioting and shooting occur and the whole place goes to hell in a hand basket. Because it's The Twilight Zone, with its mandatory groan-inducing denouement, we learn at the close of the show that two big-headed aliens, an advance team for a planned invasion of the planet, have been playing the Maple Streeters for suckers. What they did here, they'll soon do all over the country.
By all rights, yesterday's record-setting blackout that left some 50 million without electricity should have been a Maple Street moment, at least in terms of rioting and shooting, if not necessarily politically motivated hysteria.
The monsters didn't show up, of course, and Nick speculates on why, especially in contrast to behavior in the 1977 blackout.
It's hard to know all the reasons for the different responses to the '77 and '03 blackouts (one of the great parlor games in New York after the '77 blackout was figuring out why people had acted so much worse than they did during the great '65 blackout). But one of the reasons has to be the far greater communications network that exist today. Information technology is one of the great antidotes to panic and hysteria.