America, Then and Now

Brendan Carr, Republican member of the FCC, has been criticizing Joe Biden, alleging that since the passage of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021, wherein $42 billion was appropriated to connect rural America with high-speed fiber optic cable internet, not a single internet connection has been achieved. A truly stunning record. Three years, no connections.

That could not fail to remind me of my origins and the transformation of America that has occurred in my lifetime.

I grew up in a remote corner of rural America. How remote? So remote it took the second-greatest explorer in American history (John Wesley Powell) to stumble across my hometown serendipitously. Powell arrived at the juncture of the Virgin and Muddy Rivers (now in southern Nevada, although then it was in Utah territory) in August 1869.

The town had been founded by a group of Mormons sent there by Brigham Young in 1865. A small thermal spring fed stream, some 20 miles long, called the Muddy River, ran through a mile-wide valley between the mesas of the Great Basin desert, to join the Virgin River that originates in the Kolob of Central Utah and flows through Zion's park, over the Hurricane fault and into the Great Basin, and then into the Colorado River a little above Black Canyon, where the Hoover Dam was built, provided just enough water to sustain a small agricultural community.

Wallace Stegner, in his book, Mormon Country, wrote about the Mormons who settled that small town, originally called St. Thomas. He deemed them the Shock Troops of Zion, so devout were they in their religion. He estimated that their chance of survival in that hot dry area was about 50%. It turned out that the arriving Mormons, who were very self-sufficient, found the remains of an ancient irrigation system built by some prior Native American community that no longer existed. They dug out the system and began irrigating crops. That was likely the key to their survival. The system is still in use.

When Powell and his remaining men sailed out of the Grand Canyon at the completion of his historic voyage, there were a couple of denizens of the town waiting for him on the banks of the Colorado. They escorted him the few miles north, up the Virgin River to its junction with the Muddy River, to the town, fed him and his men, and provided wagons for Powell and his men to return to Salt Lake. There they could catch a train, as the transcontinental railroad had been completed 2 weeks before Powell and his men embarked on their exploration of the Colorado starting on the Green River in eastern Wyoming some three months earlier.

I would say that my hometown qualifies as a quintessential remote rural American town.

A stunning fact about that remote rural village in the Southern Nevada desert is that it has had fiberoptic cable for 40 years. You read that right. 40 years. It had a fiber optic cable from about the time the Internet was born (Jan 1, 1983). It was installed within a decade of the first fiber optic cable placement by the Dorset (Britain) police in 1975.

How did that come about? This is where my family comes in...

My paternal grandfather moved to the area in 1912, from Murray, Utah. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, from a focus in one of his tibias, necessitating a below-the-knee amputation. His doctors, who gave him a poor prognosis, advised him to move to a warmer climate. He was working as a math teacher at the Weber Academy in Ogden, Utah, and worked for his older brother at a pharmacy in Murray (a suburb of Salt Lake City). So he moved with his young family to southern Nevada. He partnered with a local physician in a pharmacy and general store business. He was rather entrepreneurial and set up a telephone company (The Moapa Valley Telephone Company). He was instrumental in organizing the first School District in the State of Nevada. When Hoover Dam was built, he set up a power company to provide electricity to the town. When he died, his oldest son inherited the telephone business, his partner in the power company bought out his interest, and my father, the second son, took over the drug and general store business. When my uncle became too old to run the telephone company, his eldest son took over followed by his second son. The children of my cousins still run the telephone company. In the 1980s, they made a decision to install fiber optic cable and did so. They didn't wait for an act of Congress, They just did it. My cousin, who was involved in the decision to install fiber optic cable 40 years ago, died a year ago at the age of 73.

The company is a family-owned S Corp, still surviving in the internet age.

My grandfather was rather notorious for stringing telephone wire in the Nevada desert in 110-degree weather, as he had a wooden leg, and had to strap one of the pair of the pole climbing cleats to that wooden leg to climb the pole to string the wire.

(That was not as much of a feat as that of Powell, himself, who explored the Grand Canyon with one arm. Powell had lost his right arm to a Confederate bullet while commanding an artillery unit at the Battle of Shiloh.)

Those types of behavior were more the norm than the exception then.

Today, the US Federal government cannot do what a few individuals in remote America did decades ago. The government is self-constrained with concerns over environmental impacts, tech preferences, DEI concerns, etc., everything except getting the job done.

Imagine if our current government had been running the Manhattan Project. Or the Apollo Program. It would all be Apollo 13's...

WE have the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the humiliation of Biden's Gaza pier. Biden can't get any EV charging stations built for the same reason he can't connect anyone to high-speed fiber optic cable internet.

This is not the America I grew up in, however remotely.

I currently live in an affluent suburb of Athens, GA, home to the University of Georgia. We do not have access to fiber-optic cable internet in a neighborhood that houses doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, university professors, engineers, and businessmen. AT&T keeps claiming that they are going to provide this. I moved here 5 years ago and we are still waiting. When I moved here, the physician I replaced proudly informed me that Athens was like a diamond in a bowl of grits. Not so much.

Can you understand my utter disdain for the Federal Government? And for what America has become?