Culture

Electricity

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Creative Commons License photo credit: BY-YOUR-⌘

I love electricity. And I love it even more when I can’t have it. Today a brutal thunderstorm came through my area and took down many trees and power lines in its path. Consequently, my home lost its power. There is nothing like a little loss of electricity to remind us of how dependent upon it we are. Sometimes, we are also reminded how thankful we should be for how tough the founding parents of our country were to be able to build the foundation of our great nation without even one little spark of the electric magic to help power their way. And a power outage may also remind us how miserable life would be if those crazy terrorists or any of the rogue nations we used to blather on about ever lit off an EMP – an Electromagnetic Pulse – bomb anywhere over our country and blew out our power grid. But anyway…

You can tell that good ol’ Ben Franklin, even though he supposedly discovered the stuff, didn’t have any electricity to power the lights of his home. Why wouldn’t someone want to go to bed early and rise early when there aren’t any freakin’ lights one in the house? Today, after the power went out, the sun set shortly thereafter; and, shortly thereafter that, I was out like a light, so to speak. I wouldn’t have been able to stay awake no matter what. There was nothing to do except watch the candle flicker, which, by the way, was rather entertaining for about twenty minutes. But it made me sleepy so by 8:00 pm, I was asleep.

But as soon as that power came back on around midnight and the house got its electric juice restored and began purring like a kitten getting its belly rubbed, I woke right up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I got out of bed, turned on all the lights, turned on the TV, turned on the AC even though it wasn’t hot, looked inside the fridge without knowing what I wanted to eat and pondered over my choices a little longer than I should have just because I now had the power to do so, and then went to my chair and fired up my laptop feeling like a 21st Century Man is supposed to feel—enlightened.

However, as I was typing away at this post, the electricity went out once again. And once again, my house became unnaturally silent. I’m typing only by the light of the laptop, which, according to the little battery icon in the tray, will only be available for nine more minutes so I better get this finished and published before it’s too late. Besides, without any electricity to charge me up, I’m once again beginning to feel sleepy. Hopefully, this time the electricity won’t come back on until around ten in the morning so I can get sleep uninterrupted and fully recharge my battery.

National Nervous Breakdown

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Maybe it’s just because I’m off work recovering from cancer and have more time to pay attention to current events, but it seems to me that insane violent crimes are happening almost daily. Just this week, a doctor at Johns Hopkins hospital was shot by the son of a patient. The son ended up also shooting the patient, his mother, and then himself. The week before that, there was the Discovery building hostage situation, and several weeks before that there was the mother who drowned her children. I could go on and on with all the insanity that has been happening in the past year or two but this post has already depressed me enough so I won’t.

Instinctively, I want to say that it is the bad economy and the stress that it has been inflicting on our nation as a whole that is responsible for all these insane violent crimes; however, after a quick search of the topic, I’ve found that, according to the FBI, violent crime has actually been decreasing, even during the economic crisis.

I’m no expert, but after thinking about it for a bit, it seems to me that violent crimes—murders, rapes, assaults—which are tragic enough, are not the same as these insane violent crimes—shooting a doctor and then your mother in a hospital, taking hostages because you hate people for killing the earth, drowning your children and then making it look like an accident, or dressing up as Santa Claus and going on a killing rampage—so maybe the FBI statistics don’t really apply here. Maybe, but I really don’t know.

What I do know is that as long as we have a significant portion of our population raised and socialized in violent, abusive, poverty-ridden environments, then we’re going to continue to have a portion of our population suffering from the violent crimes that are committed as a result of this environment and socialization. And as long as these violent crimes are isolated to just a portion of our population, then the majority of the population will, unfortunately, be able to easily turn a blind eye to most of it.

But when the entire population is suffering under economic stress, debt, ineffectual national leaders, divisive, vindictive politics, perpetual war, nuclear brinkmanship, excessive military buildup, constant threat of terrorism, and an increasing feeling of no hope of change for the better, like it is now, then we all are going to suffer from it, no one is going to be able to turn a blind eye toward it, and, if things don’t change soon, the entire population will eventually have a national nervous breakdown from it.

Perhaps all of these insane violent crimes that have been happening recently are the first cracks in our national psyche.