The Quality Of Life

I feel fairly disconnected from the daily hurly-burly in the US. Today I noticed I’m glad of it.

The snow is falling gently outside the window this morning. My wife and I sat for a quiet moment in the crepuscular light and watched it slowly silt the walk. In a former iteration of our lives, we would have had to get up before dawn and hurriedly tried to figure out if the lamebrains running our kids’ schools preferred a day off (for themselves) today or in the summer more and had decided to close school. The safety, never mind the comfort and convenience of the children and their parents never enters into it. We don’t bother with any of that anymore. My wife teaches our kids at home. Our kids aren’t rousted every morning like vagrants sleeping in a park for the convenience of people we have no regard for, aren’t sick all the time, and can read and write.

We’re supposed to shovel in the dark, then drive among the maniacs applying lipstick in the rearview or reading the newspaper propped on the steering wheel. When they’re not giving you the finger while they pass you going seventy in the breakdown lane, I mean. The drivetime radio this morning will be particularly, but not unusually, insane — like the farthest reaches of the Internet being screamed through a sewer. No thanks. I’ll walk down the stairs in a minute to work, and hear the footsteps of my little boy skipping through the house all day overhead, instead of the Mantovani version of The Immigrant Song piped through a cardboard speaker in the drop ceiling over my cubicle.

There was the usual drivel on Forbes this morning: America’s Most Affordable Cities. It’s the monthly installment of  You can move to Detroit! The quality of life is so high there! 

The quality of life. What in heaven’s name do they know about quality of life?