My husband and I live in Western North Carolina. We are among the inconvenienced, not the devastated. Our family and property, thank God, are fine. We’re just out of power/water now for seven days now. The storm hit last Friday. As I write this it is the following Thursday. Yesterday we got back from spending three nights in an otherwise standard-issue, major-chain hotel in Charlotte, made glorious by having power. We got the very last reservation they had, and the most they could give us was those three nights. To be clear, Charlotte is seventy-five miles east of our house, which is thirty miles south from the worst devastation, and we were lucky to get what we got! Every other place we checked which was closer was either booked or without power.
Notably frustrating is that we just built our house two years ago, with a brand-new, whole house generator (this New England girl has spent too many freezing winter nights by the fire without power to go without one ever again) and we found out less than a week before the storm hit that the entire motor needed to be replaced. What ridiculous luck, huh? We’ve got a big, nearly new, useless brick in the backyard.
Now that we are back in our house, still without power/water, waiting, waiting, it occurred to me that typing on my now fully charged laptop about what we’ve seen and experienced might be illuminating, but perhaps for a reason you’d not anticipate: we got a chance to watch cable television, which we never, ever do anymore as we cut the cord right after Fox called Arizona for Biden in November 2020 and we’ve never looked back. (If you’re wondering how I got this piece to American Thinker for publication, I simply found a spot with a good cell signal and tethered my phone to my laptop as a wifi hotspot and voila.)
Know what I found out? We haven’t missed a damned thing. Everything and more which I needed to know — about the storm, about the veep debate, anything — I got online, via X/Twitter or other various sites I’ve made a regular habit to frequent these last years: here, the Citizen Free Press, Twitchy, RealClearPolitics, and the Conservative Treehouse. With that handful of sites, plus X/Twitter, there’s absolutely no need for any cable news whatsoever. In fact, I’d argue it’s more, shall we say, “organic.” None of that top layer of gloss and propaganda to numb your brain. You’re just getting the news you actually need, without the key-light veneer. Being a free-range, grassroots-fed media consumer is decidedly healthier!
Army Corps of Engineers
