Living in Broken Systems

In this episode

The connection

When the power grid fails in Gary, Indiana, residents get no choice about stepping away from modern technology. Sarah Lazare captures this stark reality in *The American Prospect*, documenting how failing infrastructure traps people in a crumbling system. Something interesting emerges when reading her reporting next to a piece by Joe Fassler in *The Atlantic*. Fassler looks at the writer Wendell Berry, who spent a lifetime intentionally unplugging from the industrial economy. Putting these two situations side by side reveals a sharp divide. It prompts a look at the difference between those who can walk away from modern infrastructure as a moral choice, and those whose very survival depends on a grid that keeps leaving them in the dark.

When Ruben Chavez slides down a ladder to escape a dead elevator in Gary, Indiana, Sarah Lazare leaves you with a brutal reality. For the residents in her piece, losing power is a physical trap of spoiled insulin and rotting food. Lazare shows exactly what happens when people are cut off from the infrastructure they need to survive. Joe Fassler, up next, looks at a completely different kind of unplugging. He writes about the late Wendell Berry, a farmer and writer who famously chose to live without computers, cell phones, or even electric light. Notice what surfaces when you put these two side by side. Read alongside Lazare, Berry’s choice to abandon modern technology starts to look like a profound luxury. Berry unplugs to clear his mind and protest an extractive economy, while Chavez needs the grid just to keep his medication cold. Both writers describe the exact same condition—living without electricity. But where Fassler sees a principled, voluntary stand against a broken system, Lazare makes it clear that for the people in Gary, relying on that same system is not a choice.

What lingers after hearing these two stories is the vast distance between a choice and a crisis. Stepping away from the electrical grid to farm with horses and write by daylight is a beautiful moral vision. But that kind of independence requires land and a safety net. In places like Gary, a dead power line brings no rural peace. It just brings freezing rooms and spoiled food. As the infrastructure holding daily life together continues to fracture, who actually gets to build a quiet refuge, and who is simply left in the dark?