1.10.2004

Another Cold War

Bear with me for a moment, because this tale takes awhile to twist its way through.

Up here in the so-called Socialist Republic of Vermont, the bitter cold is upon us, a time when you yelp for joy when you see the thermometer get anywhere near zero rather than stay forever - during the height of a bright sunny day - in the negative range. It comes too soon to forget last winter, when we spent most of 10-12 weeks in a similar state, when even some of the best protected pipes froze and burst, when too many cars died beside lonely road sides, and the search for anything approaching warmth because desperate and primal.

The arrival of the brutal weather this week meant a big change in how life is lived. Services were disrupted as overtaxed power substations went dark on the bitterest of nights, service trucks watch the gas in their fuel lines turn to gel, schools cancelled because class rooms were far too cold to promote anything more than griping about the weather, and efforts just to try to reach one of the far-flung general stores for a few provisions became a huge struggle.

At such times, you lose sleep up here because pets can't easily come and go from their access doors because you know it's too cold for them to be out. But you also have to get up repeatedly to feed the woodstove, to check to see if the power's gone out taking the furnace with it, whether a brisk wind has taken out the pilot light in the gas heater.

Almost every waking moment becomes tense misery because you're too cold, too tired, too wrapped up in so many layers of clothing that you look like the Michelin man even sitting in your living room, too worried about what the cold will mean. You don't want to answer a knock at the door because you know you're letting cold air inside.

Around 6 AM today, after a sleepless night of trying to keep the living room from dropping below 50 degrees because the woodstove couldn't fight the cold alone and the gas heater would not light, I began to think about the corrolation between this and the state of fear our government has done its best to feed since 9-11.

Because of cold and fear, we make excuses not to extend ourselves to people we don't know. We close our doors to strangers. We huddle uncomfortably in the false layers of security trying to warm our souls from the fear surrounding us. We find it hard to always go about our daily lives normally because we're afraid of what's about to happen. We spend outlandish amounts of money trying to keep away the cold of fear, no longer discussing quality of life, just concentrating on staying alive even if the existence is miserable. The fear and cold wears us down to the point where it's hard even to gripe aloud anymore. We're afraid to notice the good things because we don't know what's about to befall us.

But I'm tired of this bitter cold.. and I'm growing tired of the bitterness and fear shrouding this country's existence. For my house, I'm trying to make plans for what I can do to have a better winter next year. For my life, I need to take the steps necessary to make sure that the people who have shrouded my country are not allowed to remain in office for another term.

Mere existence is not life.