Should you send your children to school? Schools are targeted and so are the principals and teachers for what they teach or even daring to teach. Period. Certainly no Friday night football. No basketball tournament. Well, what about home schooling you say? Okay. What books? Do you have them already? Don’t expect UPS to deliver new ones. And, what lessons? Are you up to personally teaching your kids fractions, let alone calculus? Can you even spell calculus?
It wouldn’t be much fun staying at home either if the our Far West was the Middle East. No heat in the Winter. No air conditioning in the Summer where cool coastal towns bubbled in 103 degree heat recently. We’re fortunate in the Northwest. It seldom gets above 110 even East of the Cascades. At the same time, no electricity also means no power from Pacific Power for the refrigerator to store food, assuming you have any. Of course, no gas from Northwest Natural Gas means little is available to cook it anyway. Does that Coleman Camper in the attic still work? You better hope so. This can be going on not for hours or days, but months and years.
There’s probably no water to cook with, at least not clean water, water you can count on without thinking as we do now. That faithful faucet might become merely an ornament on the sink. Maybe you’ll still be drinking “mineral water,” but you probably won’t like the minerals in it, let alone the nasty bugs that are no longer filtered out at the water treatment plant. Those and the pipelines and conduits supplying your water are always targets of choice.
Maybe you have a well or a nearby stream. Great, assuming no one else covets it. Your great grandparents used to dig wells and divert streams. Can you? Of course, that still doesn’t solve the issue of what’s in the water? Can you test it in any way except with your own lower gastrointestinal tract? Yeah, boiling is a good idea as you recall from your Boy Scout Handbook, but you’re probably reduced to doing so at a wood fire since the gas and electricity no longer function. Keep in mind, you have to depend on others to keep those utilities working. And, they have the same problems you do.
By the way, got an ax or saw and a means to sharpen them if no gas or electricity? That wood doesn’t cut itself. It’s long, hard work even if you do have cutting tools. There’s one bright spot. You would have more free time to do it since you no longer go out for fun. No need for a gym membership.
The toilet is probably not working, not with either the sewer lines being blown up or the sewage treatment plant itself. Easy to destroy. Hard to repair.
So, get used to the stink. And, not just how your own body or the communal outhouse or slit trench smells. Wait till you learn what the smell of dead bodies is like after they spend a few weeks crushed under a collapsed building. It’s something your nostrils will never forget. Same for the cloying smell of burned bodies. Have you ever even seen a dead body, let alone smell one? How about thousands at once?
Well, there’s always watching “Desperate housewives” on the telly, right? Wrong. There’s desperate housewives aplenty, but not on TV. No KMUN or OPB radio either. Towers get targeted. And, what news arrives tends to be propaganda for somebody. Maybe there are some shortwave broadcasts available to those who bought hand cranked radios before it all went to hell. There is one bright spot with human powered radio. At least your arms will have something to do even if you don’t.
Probably there’s no mail. The postman’s motto of “neither rain nor shine nor gloom of night” deterring their rounds doesn’t seem to contemplate improvised explosive devises, nor snipers or suspicious homeowners. Newspapers? Maybe. If someone still has a working mimeograph machine, that is. And ink. And paper. Who delivers the publication to strange neighborhoods? Will they come back alive?
News will be forced to travel at the speed of rumors and will be about as accurate. There are few, if any, reporters showing up in your neighborhood anyway. Reporters these days don’t seem to care as much for combat zones as they used to back in Walter Cronkite’s days. Maybe it’s because they end up dead more often.
No telephones. Sure your land line always worked even if the power went out. But, they don’t work if the lines are down or the central station demolished and the repairmen shot. Back to tin cans on a string perhaps? Or, smoke signals? Maybe not even that. With all the bombing and fires, smoke signals might be hard to notice among all the other smoke and dust. The only thing you actually can rely on in the way of news is what you see with your own two eyes.
No internet certainly. No video games. I-pods? Maybe. At least until there’s a charge left as long as they use alkaline batteries. Since you are stuck at home, a game of catch for the kids then? Okay, but are there land mines in the field? Don’t forget how the snipers in the Balkans ethnic purges changed the risk of going outside even on the most innocent of tasks.
It’s no longer “Home Sweet Home” anymore, is it when 9/11 becmes 24/7? Come to think of it, do you still have a home anymore? Your cute little ranch or Victorian might end up demolished to clear for a “field of fire” or just be unlucky enough to be in a “free fire” zone? Perhaps your home ends up used for mortar practice. Now that sales ad about a great price for a “fixer upper” is actually accurate.
Of course, it’s not always the bad guys with bad intentions who wipe out your homeowner tax deduction. Did the person doing the targeting against something else twitch at the wrong moment? Did he do his math right in calculating the ballistics and fire a “short round?” Nothing is more unfriendly than so-called “friendly fire” incidents. Maybe your house is mistaken for harboring a suspected terrorist. Maybe the house next door is suspected of harboring a terrorist. The blast radius of bombs is pretty substantial. Either way, do you end up living in a tent in the Winter as a refugee to escape the bombing? Or, maybe the roulette ball ends up on double zero and you’re the one crushed under the collapsing rubble while your friends try to clear with their bare hands. Once you thought all you had to fear was being bitten by a mosquito with the West Nile Virus. What a fond memory.
No matter where you live, you need money to live. But, it’s downright dangerous to go the office to earn that money. That crate marked Coors laying at the side of the road? Is it empty cardboard or hiding C-4 explosives? The used tire dumped by the stop sign? Just shredded from wear and tear or waiting to shred you? That freshly turned dirt in the pot hole in the pavement? Make you nervous?
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