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Last night our car battery died, leaving us stranded in a windchill of 40 below, an experience that triggered sobering thoughts about life in America today.
The evening before, as I drove home rain pattered the windshield. The temperature gauge in the car said 43, the sky looked like the gray of March. Twelve hours later the mercury had fallen a numbing 50 degrees, which combined with winds clocked at close to 40 miles an hour meant that bare flesh could take on the ominous pale color of the early stages of frostbite in matter of minutes. Had our car died on the highway, I might not be writing this now.
As an old wilderness guide and former resident of a town where the local garage mechanic used to cruise the country roads at night in case someone had gone off into the ditch when it was 30 below, I like to be prepared for cold. When we used to drive down to my son’s college basketball games I would stuff the car with expedition-quality sleeping bags, a coal shovel, a complete tool set, survival gear and every Minnesotan’s winter companion–jumper cables. This time I did none of those things and almost paid the price.
The main culprit was an aging battery. I knew the battery would need replacing soon, but like everybody reading these pages, I was calculating what we could afford. Our winters here have been unusually mild lately, so I gambled the battery could hold on for another month or so because since Christmas just about everything we own has needed some kind of repair from the defective refrigerator limit switch that turned ice cream to slush to the hard drive on my computer that ate two long nights worth of work. With the bills piling up, the battery had to wait.
When we were finally back on the highway after I came close to getting frostbite on my fingers trying to get the car to start and I realized my feet were still there, I thought about the millions of Americans who have been making similar trade-offs over the past few years. Our decision to hold off on the battery reflected similar daily dilemmas all of you face as you try to juggle various bills with various needs. That’s why we have a mortgage crisis and people are pessimistic about whether their children will live lives even more economically-challenged than ours.
But we are the lucky ones. As tense as it was at times, the dead battery represented an almost laughable inconvenience compared to what millions were dealing with that night. For them it was not about something as trivial as a battery, it really was about life and death. That night as the winds howled, there were families not far from where our battery died who had to decide how they would survive that night in a simple frame house with little or no insulation and an aging furnace that put out too little heat and ate too much money. I suspect many of them did the only things they could–bundled up as if they were outside, turned on the stove, lit candles and prayed morning would come and the winds would die.
But these decisions all had consequences and trade-offs far beyond needing to buy a battery. The heating bill for that night would have to be paid by deferring something else like a clinic visit or even food. Yes, more families than there should be in America had to choose last night between eating supper and freezing to death.
Why? Because America has frozen them out. In the name of some abstract concept so foreign to some of those freezing people it might as well be quantum mechanics–a balanced budget–our President and Congress had cut back on home heating assistance, food stamps and children’s health insurance. An analysis by the Minnesota Budget Project estimated 22,400 Minnesotans could lose their low income heating assistance in 2008 due to Bush budget cuts. The Michigan League for Human Services put the number in that state who would lose heating assistance at 84,000. But the villainy is even more serious, for as we all know only too well, energy costs are going up, particularly in states that depend on heating oil. Capitol Comments notes:
LIHEAP, however, has not been keeping up with the rise in home energy prices. As a result, the purchasing power of the average grant has been declining.
I’ve presented charts and graphs and data in various essays so many times that this time I will leave them out and ask you to read the following scenario then close your eyes and think about it for a minute in a moment of silence to those who had to face last night with their heating assistance cut.
Maybe you have never experienced forty below windchill, but imagine the coldest cold you have ever felt and then multiply that many times over. Then place yourself in a single floor, wood frame house where the wind shakes the walls with an otherworldly rumble and deposits blotches of frost and ice where it can work its way through the cracks. You have no windows because they now resemble the cracked glass on shower doors found in cheap motels. Your children are crying because their hands and feet hurt, so you put them in bed, throwing everything you can think of on top of them. The smell of gas from the stove pervades the air. Carbon monoxide, even if you think about it, inspires considerably less fear than the thought you will fall asleep and the burners will blow out, turning the house into a time bomb.
In the northern Minnesota of my roots there have been stories in the paper for generations. A house blows up. A family is found dead. Here law enforcement, fire and social service officials estimate the number of these stories each autumn. Under George W. Bush and the wimpy Pelosi Congress, that calculation has ominously crept upward, especially with this latest so-called budget stimulus deal in which Pelosi and her House colleagues decided to ignore the people who faced last night with no reserves. What would $1,200 do for them? Especially after the winter is over?
It reminds me of the apocryphal story of the nineteenth century tycoon whose idea of charity was to periodically throw money from his carriage. But this is the twenty-first century not some Dickensian vision of the past. It also reminded me of stories in the news today about people dying in the cold spell in China. But this is America, not some impoverished Chinese village, but for too many people trying to make it through last night there was little difference.
When you go to vote next Tuesday think about that. Then cast your vote for someone who promises to change it. This morning when I woke up I immediately glanced at the paper to see if anyone had died last night. Thankfully, everyone survived. But that we should even be checking such statistics is a national embarrassment.
I think about how up north where my parents are buried the ground freezes so hard in the winter you cannot bury anyone. So the coffins pile up in a brick building on the edge of the cemetery waiting for spring.
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