Eric Shaw Quinn

The phone is dead.
I’m stranded, helpless, clueless. It baffles me. How will I manage? Thank God I switched to cable internet or I’d be completely cut off, isolated from the world. How ridiculous is it that I feel this way?
I have become completely dependent on a few basic utilities, without which, my life is not possible.I live in an apartment in a highish rise building. On those rare occasions when the power goes off I might just as well live in a cave high up a sheer cliff face – no a cave would be better, I could build a fire to warm myself. This place is useless without electricity. I can’t cook. I can’t see in many of the rooms, even in daylight. There’s not even any hot water to clean myself. I must climb an unlit staircase to get up to my floor once the emergency battery lights give out as there is no means of natural lighting there.
I have become helplessly dependent on the most fragile set of circumstances.
I am the first generation in my family to have had indoor plumbing my entire life. It’s not like I’m the oldest living confederate veteran or something. Running water and electrification have been universal in this country for a relatively short time. Huge government programs brought us light as they helped bring us out of the depression a little over sixty years ago. There were hardly any paved roads here just a hundred years ago, and no highway system at all. President Eisenhower started the program that crisscrossed the country with freeways in my lifetime.
Today, if I lose my debit card I’m unable to feed myself, the microwave is taking forever and the damned cell phone keeps dropping my calls.
I wonder what record, if any there will be of us from this period?
These little treatises I post here are never on paper at all. Some sort of electromagnetic blast from the sun would erase most if not all of the records of the last ten years of my life. It’s enough to make me wonder if we are more advanced than those cultures we consider so primitive. I don’twant to go back – hell I don’t even want to go outside if I can avoid it. But the phone or the power being off reminds me of how tenuous and fragile my civilized life has become.
Yet I am bombarded every day with the demands of those who want to take apart or at the very least stop paying for the operation that sustains the very fragile luxuries of our lives. Do you know there are places in our country that are unpaving roads because dirt is cheaper to maintain than pavement?
What would city life be like without pavement? And country life? What if farmers had to clear brush and timber to get our food to market?
As we embark on this debate over the course of our country, I do hope that some voices of reason will emerge soon to remind people that paying our taxes is about funding this way of life that we’ve spent the last hundred years or so creating. If the power grid and the highway system aren’t a great value for our dollar, what’s the alternative? Somalia? Is that really better? How’s small business doing there with no taxes or regulations or a minimum wage?
I like flipping the switch and lighting my house, watching a movie or cooking my dinner. I love that it took me only a couple of minutes to get to the drug store, the market and the gas station today.Even though it had been raining, the roads were open and pasable. Our society is a marvel of interdependence fostered by the strong central government that emerged after the civil war. It was paid for by a thriving middle class who benefited most from their investment. I’m sorry so many people don’t seem to like that. I want a first class country, not a discount knock off. We will not pass this way again, so why not?
I hear all these complaints about deficits but no one willing to pay them off. I understand. I don’twant to pay taxes. I don’t want to pay for anything, if I don’t have to. I’d skip paying rent and load up on groceries if there were no checkout stands. But I like living in a place with firemen and water and paved roads and public schools and hospitals.
Yep, that’s right. None of us want to pay taxes. Tough. None of us is willing to sacrifice anything to avoid it. We’re glad to cut other people off, but not us. I’m bored with this discussion, aren’tyou?
The state that I live in started this so-called tax revolution back in the 70’s when our school system was the envy of the world and our highways the model for a new age. Today, we’re broke. We can’t put together a budget to cover the cost of extravagances like educating the young. And yet, no one here wants to pay for anything. The upcoming elections are another tired discussion about taxes.
Every election since 1980 has been a referendum on whether or not people want to pay taxes.California’s former governor took the cause national back then when he moved into the White House and it’s pretty much been all we’ve talked about since. I’m over this conversation. I thought the 21st century would be about flying cars and transporters and intergalactic travel. Are we really still talking about whether or not there should be a union?
On the plus side, today I won’t be receiving any of the robo-calls urging me to join their cause to stamp out civilization as we know it.

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