When the lights go out

Power went out in San Francisco today. A quarter of the city is down, hundreds of thousands of people. It’s getting dark now. Supposedly they’ll have it back up in a few hours. I believe them.

One thing about living off grid is the instincts never really leave you. I knew where to find my headlamp, because I always have a headlamp in my bag. I have some battery banks stored, some clean water, candles.

I’m not a survivalist or anything. I know what it’s actually like to try to survive by yourself, it’s not a life any of us really want to lead. We are humans. We’re social animals, for all our flaws, and we come together in a crisis and that’s how we survive: by working together with the people around us.

So I take a battery bank to my neighbor who lives alone so their phone won’t die. I run an extra tank of water in case plumbing goes down. I keep the freezer shut so my ice cream don’t melt. Simple things, but you want to know what to do and before it’s time to do it.

If the power is still off tomorrow we got to start checking on everybody, Gather people in the park, make sure folks are getting fed, have a place to poop. Last thing you want is everybody figuring it out for themselves on the sidewalks or whatnot. Realistically in a city you only have to make it three days before national or external forces are going to get involved. Three days to take care of each other and rebuild society from scratch.

We’ll have to hone these skills in the coming years. I mean, I’m someone updated positively on technoindustrial society from the COVID era. Imagine how low my expectations were before! But that’s not the last disaster we’ll face. We’ll still be vulnerable to blackouts, and diseases, and earthquakes, and climate change, all the regular stuff will all keep hitting, and plus we’ll have AI and robot war and biohacking and whatever new horrors we invent next.

History is not over. We have barely begun to disarm death, to travel to the stars. There’s so much work to do. The indignities of uncaring nature still claw at us, trying to drag us back into the dirt. But we are humans, We are the stewards of this planet, whether we like it or not, and we got here not by lone wolf survivalism but by working together. That is how we will make it through the next few years, and how we will make it through the next hundred years, and how we will make it through the next 10,000.

We are humans. We are the animal that shares our power. We’re stronger together. When the lights go out in the city, that is the spark of hope that I cling to.

See you in the morning.

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