Blackout

I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how to write about a subject that has continually confounded me. I’ve been trying to write about an aspect of coastal Colombian culture that is so different from our own, and so refreshingly original: its simplicity. The problem is that writing reams and reams explaining the intricacies of simplicity is notoriously counterproductive.

But something happened recently that shed a little light on the topic for me, and I feel like recounting it may serve to explain a little what I mean. Ideas that resist explanation with words often succumb to stories, so despite my fondness for unnecessarily complex abstractions I will share it with you.

A couple weeks ago the neighborhood I live in suffered a blackout. It was about midnight and everyone was already in bed, but since even at night the heat is unbearable without fans at full blast, we were driven from our beds out onto the front patio.

I was struck at once by the similarity of the scene to the opening credits of a zombie movie: groaning, half-conscious figures lurching out of the darkness into the street, muttering unintelligibly to themselves. We all plopped down in various places – some on the floor, others in chairs, still others sprawled out on the front steps – and prepared for our midnight vigil.

And yet the strangest thing about the event wasn’t the absurdity that a power outage in the middle of the night should be so inconvenient. It was instead how totally normal the event seemed. It didn’t occur to anyone to complain, nor could they have thought of anything to complain about if someone had suggested it. I had the novel feeling that electricity wasn’t really necessary, which is something I would have sworn I was incapable of feeling, and the prevailing mood indicated more the departure of an unnecessary luxury than the cutting off of a biological necessity.

We sat around like this for about an hour, peering into the darkness and observing our neighbors in their own sullen contemplations, a lone cell phone playing house music our only link to the electrified world. Eventually the houses across the street lit up one by one, and when it came our turn everyone filed off to bed.

This is an attitude common in the developing world that is so difficult for us 21^st-century Americans to understand. There is a strong sense of inevitability, an unspoken belief that life’s events unfold in preordained order, independently of our actions for better or for worse. The effects of this are interesting: sorrow and regret in the face of daily frustrations or even great tragedies are minimized, as in the end nothing really could have been done. By the same token, a positive attitude in the present is a must in an existence that could be cut short by divine decree at any moment, regardless of how careful one might be.

As in the rest of Latin America, where each country’s blessing is also its curse, this attitude also has its downfalls. In many cases where people do, in fact, have the ability to effect a situation, they just don’t see it. The rich will always be rich and the poor will always be poor (so the thinking goes), so it can be difficult to illicit ambition beyond what is normally expected of whatever class the person was born into. Traditions or beliefs that just don’t work in the modern world continue to live on past their usefulness, while superstitious explanations that satisfied past generations continue to play a role in a society that should know better.

My feelings on the issue have in the meantime become quite conflicted. On the one hand I’ve actually come to enjoy the frequent blackouts. They are like an ontological stop sign forcing me to just stop and sit for a while. However, I know that it is infrastructure deficiencies like this that hold Colombia back in its growth.

I’m not going to say which way of thinking is better, our fast-paced obsession with progress or their timeless reverence of the past. All I know is that we have a lot to learn from each other, and the lessons definitely go both ways.