I love this site because it really makes me think. Not so much because I haven’t had fleeting thoughts along these lines, but the continued discussions remind me to stick with it, the prepping. I don’t have dreams of self-sufficiency, just bearability. My husband says I am depressing and full of doom and gloom. He is full of DENIAL!
Through out this discussion I am reminded of the IMPORTANCE of true friends and knowing who you can count on. (Don’t worry, I don’t mean I’m gonna come a knockin‘…) Good advisors and confidants are hard to come by.
I grew up in the country, my father was a builder/contractor, he built houses, bridges, shopping centers, hydro electric dams, whatever needed to be built. I moved to the city for college and my first job, as a engineer. I work in the medical field on imaging equipment, X-ray, MRI and Ultrasound. It has always saddened me to see my “smart” colleagues “live for today, the hell with tomorrow” or just “let the good times roll“. Smart people act dumb too.
When CA real estate started inflating in early 2001, there was no denying the writing on the wall. We bought the most (tiny by some standards) land we could afford as far from, but still commutable to the city we worked in. When the bubble burst I switched to a more stable job, my husband lost his construction job and is now a long haul trucker. In between we “forgot” our plan as the “economy” ignored reality too. I doubted my instincts and just lived like maybe all the “Polly Annas” knew something I didn’t. Today the local news was speculating on how people are “starting to believe” in the stability of our economy again. Would those be the people who after loosing their homes, and relieving themselves of debt, now feel optimistic about THEIR less encumbered futures? Or like the Greeks and Romans, have they just purged and now will belly up to the buffet table of OLD spending habits and debt accumulating ideas? Adaptation to conditions requires accurate assessment of the situation… Where is an independent media?
Everything exists on a scale, from nothing to something. There are no absolutes. Cities foster personal dependence, rural living fosters personal independence. Cities have scale/magnitude on their side, sheer numbers. Watch Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, gory but simple enough to contemplate scale and degrees of agression vs. technology. If TSHTF as hard and in the ways some predict, there needs to be those who can rise from the ashes. History shows reward going to the smart and overly aggressive.
People who think they are smarter than others, under estimate other people and their will to survive.
Do live for the simple pleasures in today, the ray of sunshine, a gentle breeze or the affection of your loved ones, there can be no regret or shame in that. ~C

With this much of a distorted picture of reality, and a society as complex as ours with its multitudinous divisions into tunnel-visioned, narrowly-focussed areas of expertise, I pretty much think that true hard times will be a helluva lot harder than most folks can deal with.

As in the 1930s, country folks have better odds…

I must admit – I wondered about his desires for a pig fart driven Road Machine to cruise post-apocalyptic roadways, too. Sounds like time to hole up, stay home, and not go road-trippin’ lookin’ for excitement to ME, LOL. Do they have no idea peeps what the unprepared, starving thirsting (even unmedicated?) populations will be doing and that as they hop the interstate sytem, it won’t be at all like heading up an entrance ramp now? Eh…probably not. They all think they’re gonna be John Wayne, or Audie Murphy. They don’t mentally project how bad and how dangerous it will get and how fast it can and will happen and that roadways won’t be open-roads as they are now – but very likely littered with barricades whether natural calamities, out of gas, crashed vehicles creating obstacles, or intentionally created barricades of all sorts. Crowds can be bad enough now – a horrendous spectre…then.

We just had company over who left a few minutes ago, and as we were talking about it, the friend was shaking his head over the those in cities who have a bug-out-bag “And A Plan” – but a self-centered “plan”, mind you – and one they think is unique and clever very, very workable, and they don’t think it through and dwell on the mechanics enough to realize if they’ve thought of it, so has every other jackanape, survival type or Zombie. As he says they will swell up like Tom Turkeys, or a Peacock in full preening plummage and say, “Well, if TSHTF I know this ‘abandoned land’ and I’ll go hole up there, shoot me a deer or something. Or I know this State Park. I’ll head for that…” and live happily ever after. Never shot a deer. Don’t know how to dress one out. Won’t have brains to tie-off the gut before they stab into it and get e-coli smeared everywhere, etc. He snorted and said yeah, them and anyone else, too – thinking ahead (but in an illogical manner) and they’ll discover someone IS paying taxes on that “abandoned property” and is gonna protect it.

In recent days a young city acquaintance on a forum, age thirty, whose long-time girlfriend (many years) vamoosed, who went Paintball playing (first time) over the Easter Weekend shared on forum “If TSHTF – I’m DEAD!” He was “taken out” in the paint ball game in no time playing a game and realized it it was live lead he’d have been a screwed pigeon f-a-s-t. It made him woefully aware of(a few) shortcomings. BUT I am sure, not to the point of getting out of a condo and away from one of the roughest and toughest meanest street cities in the USA, or really becoming aware of the degree of his…survival/prep ‘deficits”. I responded him with congratulations for “facing the fact” that he’s actually a “dead man walking” in society. Congratulated his post as “public service” to get others to realizde they are no better than he is and will not “live long and do well”. He didn’t respond – not surprisingly. I think he’d hoped for assurances that he’d be okay what picayunish prepping he’s done thusfar.Or that Mama Essie would say, “Y’all come here, hear?” Uh…not! But I did tell him he’d have a lotta, lotta company facing exactly what he’s starting to realize in his better moments what is his fate. They say misery loves company. Um…even unto death? Grim as it is when ‘it’ hits I think the suicides will be to the degree to make persons…aghast…as some decide to end it by their own hand rather than wait for unleashed and crazed society to do it for them.

And on that churlish, brutal, honest point, my dears, have a GOOD day, as I know, like I intend to, ya WILL!!!