The Power Went Off

and a light bulb went on

Along the roads where there were once ancient paths to this remote, rural town in Hawai’i, ironwood trees were imported and planted by ranchers and sugar plantation owners as windbreak. For the second time in three days high winds took down one of these aging ironwood trees, and, with it, the power lines providing electricity to our town. With everything going on this week – and by that I mean the necessity of playing catch up after a week away in NYC on top of the ordinary first week of the month recurring events on my calendar - as much as meaning - you know – shall I whisper it or shout it? – ok I will just say it: The Elections¹. With everything going on this week I did not need two 8-hour power outages.

Or did I?

If you are my age, perhaps sometimes you hear Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in your head.  You can’t always get what you want…bam bam bam…you get what you need.

Oof.

Sibling text from an earlier power outage. I said I was fine because I could make coffee on my gas stove. My brother, who lives in the desert, evidently needs A/C in the summer. My sister has a sense of humor.

The two weeks’ worth of laundry will have to wait to be washed. The floors will have to wait to be vacuumed. The online continuing education class I need to complete? I have until the end of the month. Those were not exactly things I craved doing, but those were my entirely boring plans when I got up this morning confident of my power.

My cell phone still has two bars of reception and was fully charged when the power went out at 8:47 am, an exact time I know because every half hour I check the Hawaiian Electric app. At first it promised a restore time of 1pm, but now it is 1:53 pm and the restore time field reads “unavailable.”

My laptop is also fully charged so here I am writing offline rather than directly onto Substack. I am still committed to producing the weekly essay to post Sunday morning, an essay which I have been dreading writing. Dreading because I do not want to write about The Election and at the same time it seems impossible and irresponsible not to write about the U.S. Elections of 2024.

Why I don’t want to write about it is because I am also committed to caring for my nervous system. This week I did my best to avoid media and social media for anything other than searching for answers to Who Won My County Council District Race and When Will Power Be Restored to my Neighborhood. And even so, I opened email, and the Substack writers to whom I subscribe are all writing about, at least mentioning, the presidential election and its consequences. I cheated and read them. They are smart people and I learn from their views. And then I calmed my nervous system. So I will write and then I’ll calm my nervous system later. I’ll drive down the hill and sing along to music and hug and dance with friends.

When I began writing about the electrical outage, I started to write what I would be doing “if I had power.” But I did not use those words. When that phrase popped into my head, instead of a preference regarding the state of electrical lines running into my neighborhood and house, I heard “power” as something more personal. I heard “power” as agency. As an ability to do things others cannot. What I would be doing if I had power.

I have written about power in these pages before. I confessed my ambivalence about the power I had over my mare Zara, the means to force her to do things she did not want to do, including to accept a saddle and rider on her back. What is at stake right now is similar. It is not just the consequences of Power I fear. It is the consequences of Power Over that has me concerned. The ability to do things at the expense of the wellbeing of others and feel justified in doing it. Many of my friends and acquaintances are feeling sadness, terror, anger, anxiety as they contemplate their choices now and the lack of choices they may be facing when those newly elected take Power. Take Power Over Them.

We shake our heads in disbelief, although the breakdown, the seemingly overnight change, came with far more warning than the terrorist attacks of September 11^th.  Yet in both cases – and this is my Buddhist dharma thought bubbling to the surface – the conditions were in place for years, months and days prior to the “event.”

I too, exist as I am in this moment as a consequence of all the decisions made by me and my ancestors up until now. My decisions today will matter to who I am tomorrow. I hope they will matter as positive outcomes for others. On Monday, I was committed to finding structural, systemic solutions to create a more just, equitable, healthy, thriving community, Hawai’i, and world. I was equally committed on Tuesday. And on Wednesday morning I doubled down on my commitment to the work. The sources of my commitment are explained in the stories and essays I have written here over the past two years.

Today I thought of one more key story about how I got to here.

I remembered the shock and disbelief I felt 54 years ago when a friend from Ohio, from my Unitarian Universalist youth group, called to tell me about the shootings at Kent State. It seemed unreal, surreal. For sure, it was not the first violent moment of the times. Just maybe the first moment when I thought “that could have been me.” I was fourteen years old.

Kent State happened about a year after the Stones released Let it Bleed, the album with You Can’t Always Get What You Want on it. We all remember the chorus, but do you also remember the lines “And I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse”? Demonstrations were everyday news.

Values clashed, sometimes violently, in the streets of America. The album came out just months after the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention and Police Riot, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Just as 1968 saw both the escalation of the Vietnam War and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, 1969 was both the year of Woodstock and of the election of Richard Nixon. As the year of the Moratorium demonstrations against the Vietnam War, 1969 marked a tiny turning point in my young life. According to Wikipedia, over 15 million people took part in peaceful marches against the war on October 15^, 1969. At my middle class, all white high school, I was alone in wearing a black arm band that day in solidarity. My small act of rebellion got me “my fair share of abuse” as I was screamed at by a teacher, who, when I politely but steadfastly refused to take off the armband, sent me to the principal’s office to be kicked out of school. For what, I am not sure. Violation of the dress code? Disagreeing with a teacher?

It seemed like a big thing to my peers, but it was not really a big deal. I could act with safety and confidence because the setting was a suburban high school and I knew I had allies. My parents, although raised in neighborhoods and schools where they experienced discrimination for their ethnicities, were white, college-educated professors, both veterans who had served in the army in World War II. Those attributes gave them inherent privilege to effectively support my right to express my opinion. Which they did. I was allowed to return to school the next day. And to continue to engage in conversations about my opposition to the War.

Going to school with a black armband was a small, safe taste of what it means to stand publicly, visibly, for a cause. There have been times in the decades since when I stood in lines of protest with more at stake. There have been moments when I used my whiteness and standard English to stand as a shield when a white police officer challenged friends who are black or brown.

There may be times in the near future when we are called to declare where we stand, not just with our words, but also quite possibly in ways jeopardizing the safety of our bodies or our bank accounts or our privileged lives. In the stillness of the power outage, I reflect on this. When I was young, I felt invincible, immortal. Approaching my seventh decade, I feel all too mortal. Maybe that is another kind of invincibility. The same way that after the age of 60 suddenly it seems ok to say F#*k, it seems ok to get arrested or lose my good girl badge for saying F#*k to policies that are just wrong and to the people who want to enforce those policies. Policies that I consider wrong because they harm people I love.

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I think it is time for me to disconnect from the false security of the infrastructure on which my privileged lifestyle depends. It is time to go off-grid.

And just like that. Lights just came on.

I kid you not.

1. This essay is not about which candidate I voted for, or the fact that I did choose to vote, but if you are cheering the outcome of the election, I beg you to keep reading, to stay open in your listening. Please don’t unsubscribe. We have more to talk about than ever.