The Light Will Come Back On

By ART CULLEN

Thunder booms bolted me awake Memorial Day morning early, driving Peach to the farthest basement recesses. Lightning wanted to shoot through the bathroom window while I showered. The coffee pot produced a few good squirts before the sound of what could have been a bomb going off, when all went black.

A few sips, and an ember in the darkness.

It was comfortable enough. What to do? I have read what’s worth reading on the internet via cellphone. I would drive to Dyno’s for a full cup but the electric garage door is a hindrance. So you sit there and look at the wall, which in time could lead you tortuously to look into your soul. Get hold of yourself, man!

I know that MidAmerican Energy will light my world again soon. They always do. It’s pretty remarkable. This is not Texas.

You realize how worthless you are without a toaster.

Dolores is more practical and cheerful in times like these, but she is gone to St. Joe to be with her dad.

People lived in sod huts against the prairie blizzards with a mere lantern. The brave people of Ukraine are holed up in makeshift bomb shelters. My folks rode with the cattle over the pond from Ireland fleeing the potato famine. They lived among the swamps of Palo Alto County when Fort Dodge was still a fort — the Mulroney boys nearly froze to death delivering mail when their wagon got stuck in a creek near Cylinder.

And I’m frustrated because, on Tuesday, the cable TV went out and I couldn’t watch the Twins start a losing streak. The deprivation lasted an entire day!

Which forces you to quietly eat supper that night thinking:

We live in heaven, or at least the most prosperous place on Earth, and we’re frittering it away while thinking we was robbed.

You can talk with your wristwatch about your heart rate. Yet there I was reading in the dark about the potential for rolling blackouts in the Midwest this summer because of our screwed-up grid. You would think if Houston can keep people in space living on Tang they could keep the lights on in Chicago. We have the technology but not the will.

I can listen to any genre of music by barking an order in my car. I can choose from chicken, beef, pork, lamb, shrimp or catfish at any number of grocery stores. I can vote, and it counts. Yet people would try to prevent everyone from voting, or counting the votes straight-up. People are fomenting war against the Republic. They have convinced themselves that the elite stole their franchise. Children are gunned down in schools, and old people in churches.

You appreciate in the absence of these things — lights, heat, computers, TV, plumbing, basic security — what you had. And, how is it with all this knowledge and technology that we have rolling blackouts? Or, how with all this freedom and democracy enshrined in a Constitution giving all power to the people could we give way to autocracy? The most advanced policing and legal system in the world cannot make a funeral or a movie theatre safe from attack, even in a place so placid as Storm Lake.

The Mulroneys in the sod huts were escaping British oppression and seeking some sort of freedom out here. My father fought in World War II against the same malign forces that the Ukrainian people are fighting today. Me, maybe I’m not up to it. It’s hard to imagine. I couldn’t even finish a shift on a packinghouse kill floor if I were young. I’m annoyed if I have to wait in line for somebody else to make me a hamburger.

Lines of people are clamoring to come make that burger for you on the kill floor. We are told they are a threat. You are told they are replacing you. You need guns against that, people surely believe. We lock up the poor because they want to make our hamburgers. They want what we have: freedom, security, tolerance and opportunity. We try to keep them down if not out. We will not extend to them the freedom we claim for ourselves as a birthright, despite wanting cheaper hamburger. When the light goes out on the Statue of Liberty, it’s hard to see a way forward.

The sun was up and bright by 8 a.m. The lights came back on. So did Twins baseball, an absolutely necessary distraction from what we are up against. We should be grateful and watchful. We can fix these things. We know how.

Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2022

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