Edison's Medicine
So this morning is the first time since Sunday evening, that I've had electricity in my neighborhood.
The past few days have been jumbled together as a 19th century thesis on the state of society and its all-encompassing reliance on the technology stemming from Tesla's brain, Westinghouse's pocketbook and Edison's effete snobbery and slander, which eventually lost him the war.
As I watched the fires burn and the desolation of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that this area has become, I have pondered Society's outcome in this age of technology and enduring relationship with electricity.
When this relationship comes to an abrupt and unpredictable end, Society as we know it will crumble before our very eyes.
We sheep, so "independent" and "free" in our ways - effortlessly manipulated and patriotically inflamed by bogus threats abroad and seeming "safe" in our homeland - fail miserably with the slightest hiccup in our delicate system. I watched, with many others, as everyday citizens, red-coats and blue alike, scrambled for the D-cells and candles, no matter the cost. Fighting one on one, pushing past each other in a vain effort to grab the last case of bottled water - the last flashlight - the last diluted drop of gasoline, that final glowing ember of civility and culture flamed out to leave only icy, damp reality stripped bare. Naked and screaming, civilization as we know it, will claw for the tiniest scrap of rain-soaked wood, fully unaware that a vast, shark-filled ocean lies between it and any aspirations of landfall.
I watched and often joined, with great contempt, the herd to the inevitable slaughter.
Maybe I'm hyperbolizing this a bit much, but I watched in the last few days, what the very last few days will be like, and exactly how little time it will take for the final curtain to crash down on our fragile world.
We are all....doomed.