LA in Lightness

I dunno about electricity blackouts or stuff like that or why they happen. But I do remember the darkness when the great natural disaster of 1994 struck Los Angeles (um, you may remember it as the most expensive of its time... I think it made headlines internationally, too, because it was so important) and how nobody could use candles for fear of gas explosions, and at 4:31 a.m. it suddenly became dark. I might have been able to sleep if it hadn't been for all the wreckage nearby and the poor people shouting at each other to grap their shit and get out! Well, I'm sorry, but that's the word they used.

Now here it is 11 and a half years later and someone cut a cable or something. I can't get far into the articles about it, as I am not a superintellectual able to grasp the great ramifications of temporary power outages in the middle of the afternoon. But it appears that these days every glitch in the superfluous grid that has weaved its way over the surface of our earth is a catastrophe. We're so dependent on the inventions of 125 years ago that we can't imagine living without elevators or microwaves or these infernal blogs, which...I know, are not so old... I could live without those three things, I think, maybe. But then technology has its high points; modern medicine keeps us alive when we're too young to die (cough), though it's no fun being a consumptive in the 21st century... you can't milk it for sympathy at all, they just stick you with a needle and you're back to dancing the two-step or whatever it is you do, back to cyber chatting or watching DVDs in your car or lollygagging around the house with your iPod or mobile phone or Xbox (I haven't quite figured out what an Xbox is yet, but it sounds dirty).

An unintended problem with technology is the reverse of one of its purported salvations. In its attempts to make all men equal, especially as it becomes either affordable or universally institutionalized, technology strips us of freedom and liberty. All people regardless of wealth must stop at red lights. We can't just start and go as we feel. And we're not free from the noise and lights created by modern man's mechanization. No matter where we live--outside of, apparently, North Korea--someone else's noise is our noise, we share the incandescence of others and remain at their whim off-switch-wise. Worse, weak and frustrated men can now find a way to make bombs. There are disparities that remain, but these differences decrease as prices lower. More and more people have computers and TVs, but less have knowledge of how they work. Devices superfluous to natural survival carry great weight, but people need them to be user friendly.

Meanwhile, "looters," which I have to put in quotes because according to some it's the wrong word, felt the necessity in some cases over in NOLA to steal televisions, without concern that they would have to deep sea dive in order to plug them in. I personally would have looted, that is, "rescued," books and other precious artifacts worth holding onto historically, but then that's just me. I don't eat much.