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It took only a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher. And yet, it was the case that almost no one had any idea how the replacement technology (a coal-burning power plant for a brazier, or sewer treatment plant for an outhouse, or water purification plant for a well) worked. By the mid-1970s, who, driving down the highway, could tell the difference between an oil refinery and a coal-burning power plant? A sewage treatment plant and a water purification plant (or, for that matter, a fish hatchery)? Realistically, who needed to be able to distinguish among these classes of support? Nobody, except the professionals charged with maintaining them. As long as the switches, buttons, outlets, sockets, taps, and flushers worked, the benefit of all the rest having become distant undertakings running along long wires and through long pipes was they at they were no longer our immediate concern.
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Gretchen Bakke (The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future)