I’m reading Lights Out by long-time journalist Ted Koppel, about how vulnerable our electrical grid is to hacking. Considering the current news, I think Koppel has really hit on something.
When you measure people’s feelings and intuitions about 2017 and a Trump presidency, they’re all over the map. Facebook, the dog park, emails, neighborhood conversations: no collective consensus.
On Facebook, one woman said she felt it might spell the end of humanity. An Aussie commenter on our blog, Darren, said he didn’t feel humanity would end, but that the volume of dissent so prevalent during 2016 would get really loud. At the dog park, I half-jokingly do a countdown to Armageddon (which was the the inauguration, now 8 weeks past). I speak to former Sanders supporters who reluctantly voted for Clinton and they say the Democratic party needs to move toward a more progressive platform.
So where are we as a country, a nation, a society?
Well, sadly, we seem to be caught in a nightmare. You know the kind of nightmare I mean. The dark cellar you can’t escape, the place where monsters are breathing hard but you can’t see them, the grave where the dead whisper, If you don’t learn from history, then history repeats itself. We are in the midst of a Stephen King novel where the monsters are larger and more powerful than even King imagined.
We have a president who tweets his foreign policy stuff, pisses off countries like China and North Korea, and then has his blonde Barbie doll, Kellyanne Conway, go on TV talk shows to spin whatever he says. We have a racist- Jeff Sessions – who for attorney general – and a VP who tried to mandate funerals for every aborted fetus, a climate change denier and CEO of Exxon as Secretary of State. We have billionaires and millionaires as the guys who will dictate policy at every level.
If Trump lasts for four years, we may be wearing oxygen masks like they do in Bejing just to get through the day. But since Trump dismisses the intelligence community, we may be facing something even more dire: a blackout that lasts weeks or months because the electrical grid is hacked – by the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, Iran, who knows? Trump has made a lot of enemies already.
Koppel argues that it’s not a matter of if the grid goes down, but when. Think about it. No running water, no sewage, no heat or AC, no gasoline, grocery store shelves go empty, no internet, email, facebook, instagram, twitter. Social media goes as dead as everything else. Koppel‘s sources estimate that one in ten Americans would be dead within the first year.
Given the recent headlines, the president and his policies, his cabinet, Lights Out may be the ultimate Dystopian novel – except that the book is non-fiction. My question is what can we do collectively and individually, within our own lives, to minimize this man’s influence? Can we collectively imagine and set intentions for a saner government? Is that enough?
That’s logical and sensible, Ron and Trish. I don’t print everything off my computer, either. Just the important valuable stuff that would be disastrous if lost. But as mentioned, I have no choice about my reading material (books) due to the inability to use an E-Reader, which would save me tons of money. I go to a book exchange for my leisure novels and don’t keep them, obviously, once read. But my “work” books number in the hundreds and I am fortunate to have a walk-in closet in my Egyptian Sanctuary that serves as a library. We are gradually gathering supplies that can sustain us in a long-term blackout. Our youngest son and his wife had a generator wired into their home when they built it, and he keeps a lot of gasoline for it in a cooled dark storage building with nothing else in there, for safety. Hoarding the gasoline is necessary because obviously if the grid is down, the gasoline pumps at the stations won’t work. We aren’t being fanatical, just trying to be practical. We’ve lost several days and nites without power due to weather, and that’s when we discover how dependent we are on electricity. When Hurricane Andrew came thru recently, their generator was a life-saver for them! I have a sense that we are heading for a return to horse and buggy days. I think about the true Amish folks up north in their communities, and they continue to live without power, use oil lamps and wood stoves, raise their food, (animals, fruits, vegetables), grind their corn and wheat, no communication devices, and they manage. We may soon be living their lifestyle. That’s
a very sobering thought.
I just wrote a long response, and pushed the button, and it didn’t post. Sorry, don’t think I have it in me to write it again, but thanks for posting what you have.
I worry that this really is the end of America.
Found it, Lauren, in trash, and put it up!
I spend a lot of my day on fb these days, circulating and reading protests and articles. Just now I circulated a petition to preserve the NEA, the NEH, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as NPR. Just imagine an America that has no funding for the arts and the humanities! All those film festivals, museums, arts education programs, arts therapy programs, the Met, documentaries……the artistic culture of America that has, actually, made us great, dismissed without even a sneeze, and more sinister, the effort this represents to silence dissent and information. It is part of a propaganda system that has been put into effect from day one.
What we are looking at, as so many brilliant peopele, from Bill Moyers to Steven Hawking to Dan Rather to on and on and non…………..have said. That this is about oligarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, and the dismantling and destabilizing of the government of America. The longer this goes on, the more deeply entrenched this insanity is, and the more ashamed I am of all those people in Congress who are supposed to “protect our democracy” and are letting this happen.
This arrogant, incompetant and corrupt billionaire and his billionaire friends and a bought and paid for repuglican congress are seeking to remove virtually every social protection there is, from taking away any environmental protection so big business can pollute with no restraint, to making medical insurance beyond the means of older and poorer people, to even taking away Meals on Wheels, a volunteer organization to help the elderly, and getting rid of lunch in the schools, which are being privitized for profit (and propaganda) as well. No profit, apparently, in feeding the old or the young.
Just before the French Revolution Louis XIII said famously “After me, the Deluge”. That’s Trump and these greedy, evil people. And recently Melonia Trump commented that “everyone should just let nature heal them”. I was reminded of the famous saying of Marie Antoinette just before the French Revolution as well, when she was told the people were starving and there was no bread. She said “Let them eat cake.”
Am going to post a You Tube video that really nails what many of us are feeling. The video is actually hysterically funny – and then you realize it’s true.
P.S. I don’t own an E-Reader, which means my books are hard copy and my personal library is enormous. There are two reasons I don’t own an E-Reader.One, because the Parkinson’s tremors prevent my being able to use a “slider”, and when I try to hit a key, the tremor hits the same key multiple times, over and over. Frustrating. The second reason I don’t own an E-Reader is because when the power grid goes, and here on the beach the power goes out temporarily when the wind blows a bit above normal, I have that covered in terms of work and reading. No one asks, but I would encourage folks to make back-up hard copies of anything and everything that could be needed if there is no power. Better safe than sorry.
For several years now, many of my friends and my family have chastised me for not
making discs copies of everything important on my computer. Instead, I make hard (paper) copies, although that does take awhile. This is my response, and this blog POST states it totally: There will be a day in the not-too-distant future when the electrical grid will go down, and we are totally dependent upon it essentially for our very lives. What good will discs do me when there is no electricity??? About eighteen years ago I went to our local library to research something, and the card index had vanished. I asked the librarian where they had moved it, and she told me they had gone to computers and had done away with the card system. OK. So a couple of years later I went again, and the library computers were DOWN, which meant the library was pretty much inoperable. Get my point??? I continue, in spite of the time and trouble it takes, to make hard copies of everything that is important and keep several very large files in the house. We have hurricane supplies which include bundles of batteries that we renew to keep fresh ones available; we have candles out the ying-yang; we have other supplies to sustain us in the event of a hurricane black-out. I can read my hard-copy work and books by candlelight. I can’t play discs without power. I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I consider myself PRUDENT. As a clairvoyant, I have sensed for a very long time that the power grid WILL go down, and being prepared isn’t being a pessimist. I hope and pray to be wrong about the blackout, but I have a KNOWING that it will happen. Scout motto: BE PREPARED. Think POSITIVE, but BE PREPARED.
Good advice, CJ. But if I made hard copies of everything on my computer, it would become a full time job. I do print chapters on any book I’m writing.