I didn’t notice much when a terrific storm slammed into parts of New York City on Thursday evening. I was working at my computer in a quiet apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The skies darkened and it began to rain, and I could hear thunder. But that’s all. I made a cup of coffee and kept working.

While I remained oblivious, the storm took a frightening toll in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. A woman who was trying to walk home with her 10-year-old daughter from Prospect Park in Brooklyn told me the next day that it had been the most harrowing experience of her life. “With the wind and the rain, it was like being trapped in a car wash,” she said. “And then a tree crashed down on a car right in front of us.”

They ran soaking wet up the steps of a brownstone and the owner, a stranger, let them come inside.

The winds reached tornadolike intensity. Trees were uprooted and blown into electrical power lines. Roofs were blown from buildings. One woman was killed, and several neighborhoods were devastated.

I eventually heard about it on the news.

The movers and shakers of our society seem similarly oblivious to the terrible destruction wrought by the economic storm that has roared through America. They’ve heard some thunder, perhaps, and seen some lightning, and maybe felt a bit of the wind. But there is nothing that society’s leaders are doing  no sense of urgency in their policies or attitudes  that suggests they understand the extent of the economic devastation that has come crashing down like a plague on the poor and much of the middle class.