Did the lights just go out?

She looks pretty well put together, neat hair, coat not too dirty. But, for someone near a train station at 8 am she’s walking unusually slowly. People don’t window shop like that. At least not right here, and not now. I pass by her on the left and see the stray bits of her smooth hairdo that are oddly out of place on the back of her head. She just woke up, I can tell. Maybe just crawled out of whatever box she slept in. Maybe she just got put out of doors. But this ain’t normal. The signs of mental illness seem easy to peg after I’ve walked up Granville enough times. The slow walking, the funny sort of wanderer that seems to have a string attached to every passer by and gets turned and dragged a little bit by everyone. They look around in confusion. Sometimes they hold a cup in one hand as they wander and turn. They cold be seeking change or just puzzled as to the location of the dentures they are SURE they left right in there the night before. Sometimes incongruously warm or not enough clothing is the tip off. There’s out of season and then there’s ’no i can’t feel my feet falling off’. Mostly I see it in the eyes. They just look lost like no voice could ever call them home.

I wonder, sometimes, if I’m watching the end of the bubble. Humanity has swelled itself to the proportion of expecting clean drinking water to come from the tap and expecting civic infrastructure to be maintained. We’ve puffed our lives out with appliances and televisions and wardrobes of a size that would make a medieval king turn pea green. It’s only been like this for the narrowest fraction of human history, even though we take it as a given and assume it will continue forever.

Drinkable tap water? Just over 100 years ago, Chicago water held the possibility of cholera and it made folks pretty antsy to ponder consuming it. We had just reversed the flow of the river and sent a wall of filth heading toward St. Louis. And in doing that we started mucking with the largest fresh water reserves on the continent, the Great Lakes. Owning washing machine was pretty novel at the end of WW2. But we quickly did what it took to get them and to put on that sheen of prosperity. We blasted highways across the heartland and drove our automobiles straight to the ozone. And now we sit at the point where to continue at our current pace of assumption could make life very different and very unpleasant on this planet much more quickly than anyone could have imagined. Do we rally to preserve the comfort of future generations?

NO. We don’t. We don’t for the same reason we refused to end slavery or consider the plight of Native Americans. It’s just in our nature to not do what might be bad for business. Financial progress must be had at the expense of any moral integrity.

Is that it? Is that all we’re here for? Did the lights go out for you? Because the lights just went out for me. Maybe this is the beginning of the end. Not a blazing armageddon or brilliant mushroom cloud, but a long, whiney, whimpering plea for more more more until the whole thing just goes pop.