Back to the Stone Age: Life after EDL
As Lebanese, what would shake us out of our smug complacency, out of our comfort zones and get us to finally take responsibility for our own country? I often wonder about that. Is it taking away our sacred morning Manoushe and Nescafe, or could it be a blanket ban on American muscle cars and four-wheel-drive vehicles on our roads? Could it be a ban on Shisha? or, could it be the removal of our support system, our extended tribal family and clan?
Driving in to town the other day I figured it out. Take away our power… no, not our ability to command and bully others, our electrical power! For one thing, with nothing to do on those long nights, a lot more people would be having sex more often which means the maternity wards, nurseries, schools, and universities will be kept busy and productive over the next 20 years. (I wonder how one could harness the heat of bodies writhing in sweat, convert it to electricity, and hook it up to the grid. If we could do that we’d be assured a perpetual supply of fossil-fuel-free electricity.)
But, the most immediate consequence of a comprehensive and complete power cut is the collapse of our whole system, which doesn’t run that great anyway. It would plunge the majority of the country into the Stone Age. Not a bad thing if you think about it.
“Ah,” I hear you say, “but private generators will pick up the slack and business will go on as usual.” Wrong, because private generators cost money, money many of us don’t have. They need fuel, and fuel reserves are not sufficient to feed the insatiable appetite of inefficient private generators. Water pumping stations around the country have private generators, shinning and brand new, but local water authorities don’t turn them on because fuel is too expensive. So, with a blanket, open-ended power cut, how will we drink, or cook, or wash, or function?
The answer is simple: We have to learn to embrace the Stone Age in us. We already have the right idea, with our bare-chested, macho, muscle car driving yobbos, we just have to readjust to the darkness, to candle light, to reading and studying by the light of an oil lamp. Many Lebanese already do that, those who can’t afford to supplement the state power supply with a private generator membership.
But, more crucially, a total collapse of the state power utility would be a watershed moment for the Lebanese, like the storming of the Bastille was for the French, it would be an opportunity to erase the past, wipe the slate clean, and start from scratch. No electricity would, I imagine, be just the impetus we need to get us down to the streets chanting that all too familiar chant in the Arab world ‘Al sha3b youreed taghyeer el nizam’. When a system is as rotten as ours is, change would be a relief, like pulling out a painful molar riddled with cavities, one good yank and it’s gone!
During the tail end of our 15-year-long civil war I spent a couple of years in Lebanon living a Stone Age existence. We would head up to the source of a spring in the mountains every other day to fill up half a dozen Gerry cans, sometimes in the freezing cold, and this was our supply for drinking, cooking, and even washing at times. The state water supply would come intermittently but unreliably. At one time we spent a whole month and Christmas by the light of a gas lamp, the first time in my experience when our Christmas tree was not lit up… well, like a Christmas tree.
And, believe it on not, we survived fairly well. Certainly there were a handful of people with private generators, but not enough to make the air totally un-breathable, very few factories were operating at the time, traffic jams were unheard off because it was too dangerous to venture out and petrol was scarce and precious. Environmentally, speaking we were far better off than we are today.
I am not saying we should go back in time or back to civil war, but only to stop and think at what we consume and how long we can keep consuming, and to think if consumption really makes us happy. Another thing to think on is how indispensible electrical power is to our system, if only to our hospital ICUs, our airport control towers, our water pumping stations, to name only a few vital services and what the total absence of power will result in. Because, we are fast approaching that point when the power utility will no longer be able to continue functioning, politically, economically, and technically. And if we ever thought that moment can be forestalled till after the summer or that power barges can supplement our power supply, then we were deluding ourselves.
We should prepare for the worst, but also embrace the change to come, because after standing still for this long doing nothing and allowing nothing to get done, we lost our right to determine what change we want, change will happen like it or not and it will be out of our hands to stop it or direct it in the way we want. Think on that nation and stock up on batteries and canned goods, I know I will!
Driving in to town the other day I figured it out. Take away our power… no, not our ability to command and bully others, our electrical power! For one thing, with nothing to do on those long nights, a lot more people would be having sex more often which means the maternity wards, nurseries, schools, and universities will be kept busy and productive over the next 20 years. (I wonder how one could harness the heat of bodies writhing in sweat, convert it to electricity, and hook it up to the grid. If we could do that we’d be assured a perpetual supply of fossil-fuel-free electricity.)
But, the most immediate consequence of a comprehensive and complete power cut is the collapse of our whole system, which doesn’t run that great anyway. It would plunge the majority of the country into the Stone Age. Not a bad thing if you think about it.
“Ah,” I hear you say, “but private generators will pick up the slack and business will go on as usual.” Wrong, because private generators cost money, money many of us don’t have. They need fuel, and fuel reserves are not sufficient to feed the insatiable appetite of inefficient private generators. Water pumping stations around the country have private generators, shinning and brand new, but local water authorities don’t turn them on because fuel is too expensive. So, with a blanket, open-ended power cut, how will we drink, or cook, or wash, or function?
The answer is simple: We have to learn to embrace the Stone Age in us. We already have the right idea, with our bare-chested, macho, muscle car driving yobbos, we just have to readjust to the darkness, to candle light, to reading and studying by the light of an oil lamp. Many Lebanese already do that, those who can’t afford to supplement the state power supply with a private generator membership.
But, more crucially, a total collapse of the state power utility would be a watershed moment for the Lebanese, like the storming of the Bastille was for the French, it would be an opportunity to erase the past, wipe the slate clean, and start from scratch. No electricity would, I imagine, be just the impetus we need to get us down to the streets chanting that all too familiar chant in the Arab world ‘Al sha3b youreed taghyeer el nizam’. When a system is as rotten as ours is, change would be a relief, like pulling out a painful molar riddled with cavities, one good yank and it’s gone!
During the tail end of our 15-year-long civil war I spent a couple of years in Lebanon living a Stone Age existence. We would head up to the source of a spring in the mountains every other day to fill up half a dozen Gerry cans, sometimes in the freezing cold, and this was our supply for drinking, cooking, and even washing at times. The state water supply would come intermittently but unreliably. At one time we spent a whole month and Christmas by the light of a gas lamp, the first time in my experience when our Christmas tree was not lit up… well, like a Christmas tree.
And, believe it on not, we survived fairly well. Certainly there were a handful of people with private generators, but not enough to make the air totally un-breathable, very few factories were operating at the time, traffic jams were unheard off because it was too dangerous to venture out and petrol was scarce and precious. Environmentally, speaking we were far better off than we are today.
I am not saying we should go back in time or back to civil war, but only to stop and think at what we consume and how long we can keep consuming, and to think if consumption really makes us happy. Another thing to think on is how indispensible electrical power is to our system, if only to our hospital ICUs, our airport control towers, our water pumping stations, to name only a few vital services and what the total absence of power will result in. Because, we are fast approaching that point when the power utility will no longer be able to continue functioning, politically, economically, and technically. And if we ever thought that moment can be forestalled till after the summer or that power barges can supplement our power supply, then we were deluding ourselves.
We should prepare for the worst, but also embrace the change to come, because after standing still for this long doing nothing and allowing nothing to get done, we lost our right to determine what change we want, change will happen like it or not and it will be out of our hands to stop it or direct it in the way we want. Think on that nation and stock up on batteries and canned goods, I know I will!
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