Crash!

I’m usually pretty flippant about end of the world predictions. To my mind, when I run out of Irish whiskey and cigars, that’s very definitely a “the end of the world” scenario, with anything else merely a minor inconvenience. Yet I’m constantly bombarded by quite serious news articles predicting assorted disasters in the news, often written by some pretty solid people who are neither prone to panic nor believers in conspiracy theories. It seems they are getting very concerned about the potential end of the world as we know it. Granted that there are plenty of options available, so take your pick I guess. We’ve nearly all seen the movie “2012”, or at least understand the claims about the foreboding end of the Mayan calendar cycle. Well, Hollywierd might wax hysterical about that one, but the Mayans don’t seem to be very concerned. Heck, our calendar runs out every year, and rather than the world ending, we just start a new calendar. And we seem to have survived Y2K as well. There are always the stories about incoming “planet killer” asteroids, but the last one to hit us happened 65 million years ago. The Yellowstone super volcano could blow up as well, but that last happened 640,000 years ago. Both of these are distinct possibilities (a case of “when it happens”, not “if it happens”), but there’s not much we could do about it, and neither is predicted for the immediate future. We also have the run-of-the-mill disasters, including floods, hurricanes, winter storms, oil spills, crime waves, riots and such, but they hardly rate as world threatening incidents. Terrorists with a nuclear weapon or two might rearrange the local real estate someplace, and the threat of Islamic bio-weapons are certainly a concern, but I rather doubt that they’d kill off the entire human population. The threat of a global thermonuclear war is still a rumble in the background, but things are reasonably quiet on that front. We also have the theoretical “heat death” of the universe in a few trillion years (unless the equally theoretical “big crunch” comes first), but again, I doubt that any of us will be around to see it happen. Finally we have the biblical “end of days”, but when that day comes about all anyone can do is stand quietly, hat in hand, and hope ‘ya haven’t done too many bad things in your life. (Bankers, Lawyers, Politicians and Corporate CEO’s beware!)

So what is it that concerns these solid citizens who are predicting “the end”? A much more mundane subject I’m afraid, as when Sen. Judd Gregg (R) of New Hampshire recently stated his fears that the United States is on a course for economic disaster. Gregg said that the overwhelming debt and exploding deficits will lead to "the financial meltdown of our nation.” Along with that comment, a large number of economists and financial experts are predicting pretty much the same thing. After all, what can happen when unemployment seems locked in at 10%, and Washington is loading down the taxpayers with huge new entitlement programs on top of huge old entitlement programs… and printing trillions of inflated dollars to pay for it all? Well, I would say that such a meltdown is a distinct possibility, along with probably being a whole lot closer than I care to think about! After all, we can’t keep spending money we don’t have. Despite the beliefs of the left, the United States is not swimming in wealth, and what wealth we do have is more a case of cash flow, not money in the bank. And we’ve been supporting most of the world since the end of WW II as it is. Considering that the entire western world has been swimming in a massive pool of debt, with many nations facing the imminent specter of bankruptcy, I rather do think we are facing the “end of the world”, or at least our old familiar world. Sure, humanity as a species will survive, the planet will still be here, along with the sea and the sky, but human civilization “as we know it” is due for a massive shake-up!

We all saw what happened to the Russians when the Soviet economy collapsed, and it wasn’t pretty. But we might remember that the Russian empire, vast as it was, is still a fairly limited part of the world, and besides, the western nations poured plenty of money and resources into keeping things from completely falling apart. Russia itself, with the resources of Siberia to draw on, is coming along fairly well nowdays. Most of the “Beserkistan” republics are still functioning, abit with lots of foreign help and their normal low standard of living. But what happens when a highly urbanized industrial nation such as the United States suffers an economic collapse, and drags the rest of the western world down with it? The worldwide grid goes down, that’s what happens! No work, no electricity, no telephones, no food deliveries, no “energy” available, the banks are closed, the factories are closed, and there’s no benign socialist Obama government to assist us! By Golly, we just might have to survive on our own! ‘Course a lot of folks claim that something like that really couldn’t happen to us… the gub’ment wouldn’t allow it. Ain’t wistful thinking grand!? Something just doesn’t smell right here, and that little alarm bell is ringing in the back of my head.

Naturally the first question that comes to mind is… what can we do about it? And the first answer is… load the old pick-up with groceries and head for the hills, a response that might be realistic under a full scale nuclear attack, but unless you happen to have an insane income your options are rather limited. Property “in the hills” is expensive, while farmers, ranchers, and Smokey Bear all get really upset when they find you squatting on their land. So, without a fully equipped and stocked vacation cabin off in the woods, that may not be your best bet… well, unless you live in a heavily populated urban area, in which case I’d say it’s probably time to “get out of Dodge”. Most of us have enough groceries stashed in the pantry to last for some time, but can you feed the family for a year, or even longer? And how do you plan to cook that food without gas, electricity, or whatever? How about heating the house through the winter? Not everybody has wood heat in this day and age. Water is a necessity of life, and what do you do when nothing comes out of the tap anymore?

Many individuals might have a lot of skills that are useful in a survival situation, and even I could handle most things in a pinch. But I’m not so great that that I could do all those needed things in a hurry! I’m a fair medic but I’m certainly not a surgeon. I could grow a garden if needed, but I’m not a farmer or gardener, and any food I manage to grow would likely be at a sustenance level more than anything else, leaving me to doubt that I’d have a lot of time to apply to other desperately needed projects. Consider, I used to know several wannabe pioneer type mountaineers that figured they could head for the high country and live off the land. Perhaps… but even the Indians didn’t try that one in the winter, and their survival skills were a whole lot better than ours are!

If you live in a small town, your best option may well be to stay home, and work on the “what do we do” situation within the community. After all, most communities have nearly every skill imaginable available to them, the infrastructure is already in place, as is the social organization. Most counties and some towns have an Emergency Management Office that does an excellent job of planning for, and handling, fires, floods, and Ice Storms. They also consider the really big possibilities, but… in a real crunch… and when no aid will be forthcoming from the feds or the state, I rather think those offices are going to find themselves overloaded, and we are surely going to be totally on our own. After all, can we realistically expect the County to stash away a years supply of groceries… for all of us!? So how about we, as individuals, follow the old Boy Scout motto of “Be Prepared”, and at least come up with a generalized community wide plan of of what we would need to handle the unthinkable?