I Remember Exactly Where I Was The Night The Lights Went Out…In Cities All Across America

I remember where I was the night the lights went out.

The night the lights went out in Tampa and Orlando….and in cities all across America. The whole world remembers. While previous generations remembered where they were when Kennedy was shot or when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but the defining event that eclipses both of those…and every other…in our nation’s collective history is the night cities went dark across America. Way out here in the country we all refer to the night as “The Switch” because the lights just turned off like someone flipped a big ole switch that controlled every single light and drop of power that lit up the cities and kept them alive.

When The Switch flipped, I was out deep in the Myakka swamp, a prehistoric wilderness that time forgot situated just off the center of the state of Florida and nearly inaccessible to all but the most determined human beings. The water that runs through Myakka is inky black and the woods and water are inhabited with a population of creatures so diverse no Hollywood creator could ever dream up. Feral hogs and cougars; bullfrogs and insects; raccoons and rattlesnakes–The swamp is their pyramid and they sit firmly atop it.

I was deep in this swamp the night The Switch flipped. At that precise moment I was gliding silently across the dark water, slowly scanning the shore with my light, waiting patiently to catch two red dots reflecting back me. The red dots are the telltale eyes of one of Mother Nature’s more terrifyingly un-evolved beasts, Florida freshwater alligator staring back at me. When the red dots reflected back straight and symmetrical, I’d know just where to target my round. And then, BAM, WHACK! Fifty eight grams of led moving at 300 feet per second colliding somewhere in the general vicinity of an alligator’s walnut-sized brain. After a solid hit, it took only a few strokes of the paddle to make it to the kill zone to wrestle the beast into the flats boat. Ample protein for me and my family and maybe even a little left over to trade.

The swamp was always quiet and totally removed from the city, but even in the deepest parts the lights of Tampa to the West and Orlando further up to the north were always visible. And so even though I was deep in the swamp and far away from the cities, I saw The Switch fairly early on. I noticed the lights going off in north Tampa first. Big sections of the city turning dark. Pitch black. One section of the city turning off at a time. Slowly, but persistently. Switch. Switch. Switch. The switch kept flipping until the entire western horizon, which just a few minutes earlier was lit by the lights, was covered by an entirely pitch black horizon. And not just Tampa proper, but the entire region, as far as the eye could see. The absolute darkness that permeated the entire western horizon made the lights of the planes up in the sky and the small pattern of lights around Macdill Air Force base shine like dramatic navigation beacons across an otherwise empty sea. It was immediately breathtaking and frankly quite unsettling.

I was still just taking all this in when I noticed The Switch to the north. Switch, Lakeland. Switch, Plant City. Switch, Orlando. I sat there motionless in the middle of the swamp while absolute, uninterrupted darkness came suffocating in from every single direction. Right away it was clear this was no ordinary power outage. Not one of the more common brown outs or rolling power interruptions that had become more common over the last couple months. Those were always smaller in scope and duration. It was clear given the fact that the power was out across the entire region that this event was vastly different than anything anyone had ever experienced before. I was also fairly certain early on that this was not going to be a temporary problem. The Switch was not a minor glitch and there would be no flip in hours or days even. Standing out there in the middle of the swamp and taking it all in, I was certain The Switch represented the collapse of the power grid of great magnitude and that The Switch would have a dramatic impact on all those people still stuck in the cities.

Living Off The Grid

For me the impact wasn’t all that significant. I had gone off the grid months before. I didn’t exactly go off the grid voluntarily. Not at first anyway. I was kicked off. Pushed out, chased off the grid. But prior to my forced exile I was firmly enmeshed in the grid, just like the rest of the world. I spent every waking moment of tethered to The Grid. The internet, 4G phone, laptop, it was everywhere. On The Grid, the world was inescapable. And because the world was inescapable it became increasingly impossible to escape The Conflict.

I had been part of The Conflict for years before the Occupied Movement began sweeping across the country. Years before citizens all across America finally woke up and began protesting the assault on the formerly free United States of America. Years before Americans woke up and realized that the economy that had supported countless generations of American families had been hijacked. The Conflict was a war that pitted normal, everyday Americans against a banking and business class that gutted hard working Americans right up the middle and left entire families bleeding and rotting on the streets. I had been defending homeowners in foreclosure long before the first drop of newspaper ink reported how the numbers of foreclosures was spiking and years before bloggers and the internet came along and documented the systemic abuses of citizens and our legal system.

With so much reporting and so much evidence, I was certain that if I could just fight for my clients long enough, I could keep them safe in their homes. Surely someone in power would step in and put a stop the crimes and the abuses of the banking elite….wouldn’t they? And that’s where it all went horribly wrong for me.

Be sure to read the rest of Matt’s “fictional” story here…

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