My husband and I live in Western North Carolina. We are among the inconvenienced, not the devastated. Our family and property, thank God, are fine. We’re just out of power/water now for seven days now. The storm hit last Friday. As I write this it is the following Thursday. Yesterday we got back from spending three nights in an otherwise standard-issue, major-chain hotel in Charlotte, made glorious by having power. We got the very last reservation they had, and the most they could give us was those three nights. To be clear, Charlotte is seventy-five miles east of our house, which is thirty miles south from the worst devastation, and we were lucky to get what we got! Every other place we checked which was closer was either booked or without power.

Notably frustrating is that we just built our house two years ago, with a brand-new, whole house generator (this New England girl has spent too many freezing winter nights by the fire without power to go without one ever again) and we found out less than a week before the storm hit that the entire motor needed to be replaced. What ridiculous luck, huh? We’ve got a big, nearly new, useless brick in the backyard.

Now that we are back in our house, still without power/water, waiting, waiting, it occurred to me that typing on my now fully charged laptop about what we’ve seen and experienced might be illuminating, but perhaps for a reason you’d not anticipate: we got a chance to watch cable television, which we never, ever do anymore as we cut the cord right after Fox called Arizona for Biden in November 2020 and we’ve never looked back. (If you’re wondering how I got this piece to American Thinker for publication, I simply found a spot with a good cell signal and tethered my phone to my laptop as a wifi hotspot and voila.)

Know what I found out? We haven’t missed a damned thing. Everything and more which I needed to know -- about the storm, about the veep debate, anything -- I got online, via X/Twitter or other various sites I’ve made a regular habit to frequent these last years: here, the Citizen Free Press, Twitchy, RealClearPolitics, and the Conservative Treehouse. With that handful of sites, plus X/Twitter, there’s absolutely no need for any cable news whatsoever. In fact, I’d argue it’s more, shall we say, “organic.” None of that top layer of gloss and propaganda to numb your brain. You’re just getting the news you actually need, without the key-light veneer. Being a free-range, grassroots-fed media consumer is decidedly healthier!

The local channels, all of them, did the usual stand-ups (“stand-up” is TV lingo for one person, one camera) at first-responder hubs and distribution spots speaking to I don’t know who, because if you were in need you had no way to see the report, and if you saw the report, you had no need. The network channels did much the same, but with less localized detail. Where the locals would direct you to a high school or similar spot for this or that, the networks would direct you to the Red Cross. All in all, a superficially dubious exercise for those in need, but helpful for those of us in close proximity to know the scope and scale of the need so we could help where and how we could. Helpful too for the more distant viewers to show the scale of the devastation to inspire others to come and help, and come they did.

And to be clear: we saw zero government support. Zero. No FEMA, no nothing from the Feds. Everything we’ve seen this past week was private citizens and charities.

But we met some strapping young men from Texas staying at our hotel who had come to help. There were about a half-dozen of them, each with big, well-equipped pick-up trucks. We saw them in in the hotel parking lot, heading out to haul, tow, push, pull, lift, whatever and whoever they could in the affected areas. When I thanked them, they looked down sheepishly with various versions of “No problem, ma’am.” We also saw a network news crew pulling into the parking lot. Fox (News) Weather was the wrap on their satellite truck. So they were staying at our hotel too.

Know what else I found out? Southern hospitality is a real thing. I knew that before, but boy did it come into full flower this past week. Not only did our neighbors who had generators (or power from a power company not our own which was on-line), offer device-charging, water, and hot showers to anyone who needed them, but everyone we met along the way was exceedingly kind and sympathetic. Many offered blessings, which we thanked them for, for ourselves, but really for those of our neighbors we’ve never met and may never meet; strangers to us in our new home state, who were, and remain, so devastated. And I knew they were devastated from my rounds on my usual on-line sites, not the “news.” Where I saw pictures of flooded streets on television, I saw or read about roofs floating away with people on top, never to be seen again, on X/Twitter. I read about dead bodies in cars, dead bodies in trees (!), dead bodies floating by, in the rushing waters of Banner Elk, Spruce Pine, and Asheville. The devastation I read about and saw via many clips from many civilian cell phones, filled in the true horror of what Hurricane Helene wrought better than any pancake-makeupped, hair-sprayed “reporter” ever could or would. The mudslides, flooding, roads washed away, houses tossed like Monopoly pieces, all of it, will take months, if not years, to repair, and the loss of life? Well, the heart can bear scars that never fully heal, can’t it?

So… inconvenienced? Yup. But not devastated, thank God. And all in all, not having hot coffee in the morning was, and -- now that we are back home without power/water -- remains the thing I miss most. Cable TV? Not so much.

Image: Army Corps of Engineers

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