The Day The Music Died

Sitting in a chain restaurant this evening, after ordering I asked the waitress if the music could be turned down -- it was just loud enough to be distracting. I determined it wouldn't have mattered where we sat -- it was loud everywhere.

She claimed "No, we can't lower it, it's too hard. Lots of customers have asked but there's nothing I can do. Sorry."

I thought this was a pretty ridiculous answer. But then I thought about how this woman has no real incentive to manage such things. She likely has no real connection to the restaurant. "It's a job, man," she's not the owner. If business boomed she'd do OK, yes, but if it tanked she'd just find another job down the thoroughfare.

I thought about how this parallels our use of energy, too. If this were a matter of energy consumption she again doesn't have any incentive to manage such things. Leave the lights on in the broom closet? No matter, she doesn't pay the bill. I know I'm simplifying things greatly, but I have to think that if this weren't a chain restaurant, if the real management were local, indeed, if they were actively running the place, she might take a different tack. She might care.

There are a hundred million such people around us, everyday arguing that there's "nothing I can do" regarding their energy use. This is the consequence of building cities such as Elk Grove whose zoning codes mandate auto-dependency, whose citizens generally aren't old enough to recall past events such as 1) world instability, 2) depressions, 3) resource scarcities, 4) oil embargoes. This leads to complacency in extreme energy use, but it's not as if this didn't make sense. Our pattern of living is profitable and creates millions of jobs. We choose to remain ignorant of the chance that energy may become constrained because this whole system is utterly dependent on cheap, reliable energy.

I live in suburbia. I enjoy what suburban living provides, yes; however, for 41 years it's the only place I've ever lived ; it's all I know. The nature of such low density living along with profligate energy consumption, I believe, has led to many of the ills now manifesting: the assignment of cheap labor to Asia to manufacture goods for the rest of the developed world, destroying the manufacturing base in our country; depot sized consumption centers destroying the old sense of town centers and meaningful destinations; social degradation through solo-occupant motorized commuting, no sense of "we" anymore; sterile, lifeless suburban living where no one has any "obligation" to their neighborhoods...

We have invested so much into this way of living that we're now forced to continue to support it even as energy rises in relative price; we seemingly have no other options. We'll pull up to the fill station, murmur to ourselves and feign frustration but in the end we have no choice. Neither do we have a choice regarding the price of romaine lettuce at our suburban grocery depot, or the tax increases needed by our local governments to pay for the cost of busing students to centralized educational depots.

It's not as if we can stop driving. It's not as if we can stop eating. It's not as if we can allow our kids to walk 3.5 miles along a suburban freeway to school. We have never accepted these things and we will do everything we can to never have to do them. So we internalize hope that technology will rescue us; batterized cars.

This has to work, because there aren't many good alternatives. Indeed, it might. I remain skeptical, but it might. We're like the waitress who can't do anything about the loud music -- too set in our patterns to want to do anything about it. If energy becomes an albatross around the neck of our suburban way of life, well, we'll gladly listen to the music until the day it dies.