There's nothing like a healthy dose of perspective to take your mind off your own (by comparison) minor frustrations.

A well-known, and now somewhat controversial, song warbles, "The eyes of Texas are upon you." The tables are turned in this 14th month of 2020; now it's all of our eyes that are riveted on Texas. Other states are experiencing power outages, bitter temperatures (the deep South is colder than New England), snow and ice without the equipment and materials to deal with it, frozen pipes and immobilized public systems. But larger-than-life Texas, for a number of specific reasons, is suffering from the most severe breakdowns of all.

Fingers of blame are being pointed in all directions, of course. But one lesson coming out of this debacle (which has claimed nearly fifty lives so far, with the death toll certain to climb) is the danger posed by the delusion of self-sufficiency.

One of my Facebook friends posted a story about a young man in Texas who was a "prepper," having spent the past year getting ready for the complete breakdown of civilization if Biden was elected. (Apparently quite a few people seriously expected a "Democalypse" whereby the entire nation would instantly turn into a Mad-Max style dystopia on January 21.) This young man had stockpiled ammunition and guns, buckets of survival food (which can be purchased as packages online), canned goods, and even a CB radio (to communicate when all the cell phone towers were taken down).

Hunkered down for the second stone age, this prepper was helpless when municipal electricity, natural gas and water all broke down. He has canned food but only an electric can opener. He had assumed he would be able to cook on his gas range but there is no gas. He apparently didn't think of getting a generator to power his CB radio, or anything to burn wood in--his outdoor firepit is gas powered.

My New England friends and I who live out here in the country and have woodstoves, camping equipment, homesteading and foraging skills, food we put by in the fall, generators, emergency lanterns and backup water supplies, just to get through the New England winter, can only shake our heads.

I'm certainly not laughing at the folks in the South who find themselves grappling with extraordinary weather conditions and the complete breakdown of critical systems. I feel terrible for them. I lived through the Blizzard of '78, and the 2008 ice storm. I know what they're going through.

But it has made me reflect on the extent to which we are dependent on all the interlocking systems our society has developed to make life possible for all of us. We already experienced the fragility of these a year ago when COVID disrupted supply chains, and supermarket shelves stood empty of paper goods, non-perishable food, cleaning supplies and bottled water for weeks. (People in Texas now are shopping in stores with no electricity using cell phones as flashlights.) Roads, water, electricity, fuel, food, medical supplies...all of them rely on a complex network to be maintained and made available to us. We take that network for granted until something brings it to a stop.

None of us can survive alone. To believe otherwise is an exercise in self-indulgent fantasy. Civilization of any kind only exists because of cooperation and social bonding.

I think we understand this better in New England because we never had a "frontier" mentality. The earliest European settlers here started out with the Mayflower Compact, a written outline for an egalitarian government. Their relationship with the local indigenous peoples was complicated. Help from home was a four-month round trip by sailing ship away. Life was hard and survival very uncertain. There was always a sense that they lived to see each day only by the grace of God.

And everything hits us here in New England, except possibly tsunamis. Blizzards; searing heat; arctic cold; ice storms; hurricanes; tornadoes; floods; even the occasional earthquake. We've learned to be ready for it all.

Because of this, we've learned to depend on each other and to build structures of government that support the infrastructure and systems of society. We don't think of that as "socialism," we think of it as "survival." We're all in this together, and we all need each other. There's a lot more to that than simply being neighborly. Our complex, technological civilization won't stay healthy and prosperous unless we feed it and support it.

The federal government is sending aid to Texas. The Polar Vortex will shift back north, the temperatures will moderate, and then we can talk about what went wrong and how to avoid the next extreme weather event from being so catastrophic, especially for the most vulnerable people. In the meantime, I'm feeling even more gratitude than usual when I turn on the faucet and water comes out, or I flick a switch and get light. I love my life here. But I know how many people and how much work it takes to keep it all running smoothly.

Inanna Arthen