Hoo boy. The “United” States reveals itself yet again.
It all started this morning when, at 4:45 a.m., the power to my house failed. I know this because I had been awake a while, having never really synched back to west coast time after my Bear Force One trip to North Carolina. Since I shell out over $1,000/month on utilities, and Palo Alto has been losing its power a lot lately, I sent out this bitchy tweet:
I also sent along this map of the power outage (at least the cell towers were still working, allowing me to piss and moan without interruption):
The reactions were……………unexpected:
Karmic debt? Socialist left? Green new deal? I think these people have their red hats on way too tight. The fact is that a car ran into transformer and knocked out power for a couple of hours. End of story. I don’t think the person driving the car was reading Das Kapital at the time of the accident.
This is a poignant example of how divided our country is. The electricity to my house failed, and in response to this news, people pile on with an entire litany of how You Commies In Commifornia Deserve This And So Much More. It’s insane.
If there’s one thing Slope has taught me, it’s to generalize less. As one example, there was a time I made pronouncements about how anyone who smoked marijuana must be a lazy, poo-headed wastoid. Boy, did you people set me straight on that one. So I don’t say stuff like that anymore, because I know better now. And, while political discussion has mercifully been tamped down, it’s clear to me that any individual, no matter how distant on the political spectrum they may seem from you, often have more in common than one might first assume.
If there had been such a thing as Twitter back in, let’s say, 1982, instead of 2022, I strongly suspect the reaction to my tweet would have been much closer to “wow, that sucks” instead of these days, which, in one form of another, often comes down to the notion that “you deserve it.“
The divisions in our nation are truly unfortunate, even on such a small scale.
