I find it harder to write now that Cindy is back home living with me. I tend to be a morning person and lonely mornings sitting in the dark contemplating life are much less common these days. Ben Franklin once wrote, "Write something worth reading or do something worth doing." I guess I've been concentrating more on the "doing" rather than the "writing." Cindy is off teaching a CPR class this evening and I am sitting in my living room lit from the soft glow of two oil lamps so maybe I'll try to write something. No promises that it will be worth reading. Sorry Ben.
Alaskans, myself included, pride ourselves in being independent, self-sufficient and just generally survivors. When my wife has the TV on in the morning and the show, Kelly and Ryan disgrace my living room, I become appalled at the de-evolution of the human species. The stars of this show have devolved to something sub-human. I wonder, can they even wipe their own asses? Can they even feed themselves? They have no idea where their food comes from let alone how to prepare it. It is served to them by servants in restaurants or delivered to their door. They are totally ignorant about even basic science. They don't seem to know how to drive let alone anything about what makes a car or plane go. They shudder at the mere thought of a snowflake in the air. In my opinion they are the epidemy of useless. Has the human species, at least those living in big cities really degraded to such a sack of water?
In the interest of fairness I must also think a bit about my own abilities and those of my independent and self-sufficient fellow Alaskans. Certainly, we robust Alaskans are much better at ensuring our survivability than those worthless dweebs! The recent series of snow storms combined with supply chain interruptions has left many store shelves bare. Alaska connects to the rest of the world with a single highway that makes it way through precarious mountain ranges and across earthquake and landslide prone expanses. We have a couple of deep water ports but these are under developed and prone to many natural and man-made threats. There is no railway connecting us to anywhere. I have often lay in bed at night thinking about how easy it would be to isolate the entire state by blowing up a few key bridges. Our energy systems are just as vulnerable. We have oil but for the most part it gets shipped out as unusable crude to be refined elsewhere and shipped back to be used. A good disaster at a few key electrical sites during a cold winter would kill thousands. Perhaps it would kill enough of us to allow the survivors to to feed themselves from the wild game. That might keep a few of us alive for a short time but since all smelting and metal processing is done elsewhere we would soon be out of parts for our snow machines, cars and boats. I know many natives in the remote villages are proclaiming that they could just go back to the ways of their elders and would do fine. I ask them, do you know how to kill a moose or bear with a wooden spear? Can you harpoon a whale from a skin kayak with no motor?
Alaska and we Alaskans are far from the independent, survivalists we like to think we are. We get more aid from the federal government per capita than any other state. We can't feed ourselves, cloth ourselves, heat our homes or make our own tools. In reality, we are just worthless sacks of salt water as the Kelly and Ryan I despise on my TV. SomehowI just can't accept this. I guess I'll just go back to living in my dream world.
