I’ve got quite a lot of rice and beans saved up, and some canned goods and I’m a mechanic by trade, 2nd least likely to die in an Apocalypse scenario, 1st being Doctors, of course.
I’m rural and have running water just a short walk from the property if the well stops pumping and I’ve got an old revolver with a few rounds in case I feel like checking-out early.
You guys?
Yeah, I grew up in an area of survival agriculture, removed from actual famine by say twenty, thirty years, depending on how you count it ending. Living memory in any case. To this day people here will pester you to take food when they have a fruit tree yielding, or when they are picking potatoes. People get together to go pick grapes across all of their small properties and then roughly split the yield based on plot size, even if the yields were somewhat uneven. Friends would show up with fish when they went fishing and you’d do the same.
You want to prep for the apocalypse, start giving away food and insisting that neighbors come over to visit, then force feed them aggressively, even under protest. Then do that to such an extent it becomes deeply culturally ingrained.
Will you have a culture where your adult children can’t bear to throw anything away and will perpetually eat leftovers but never stop overcooking? Yes, you will. But you will have learned to survive scarcity.
But in the meantime, holy shit, get out of the house and start protesting. Have you seen what your government is doing? At least have the decency to lose whatever conflict leads into the apocalyse instead of just sitting there complaining about it on social media.
The thing about protesting is that the government needs to give a shit for it to have any effect, unless we’re talking about actually forcefully changing who is running that government. We’ve been screaming at concrete buildings for decades and yet none of the issues we care about are dealt with. In good times we have propagandists to placate the masses even if we had a government who was afraid of losing voters, and in “bad” times well we still have propagandists, but we also have a government that couldn’t possibly care less about what we think. I still protest, have gone to many rallies and such, and while the feeling of community is nice at the end of the day all I feel like I ever accomplished was yelling at a building with a bunch of other people.
The only way this administration is changing direction is when the wealthy go after them :(
Yeah, this would be the “lacking any agency or responsibility” part of the bafflement about Americans’ views.
Get a few million people out on the streets (and/or refusing to work) and it turns out it is remarkably hard to run a country at all.
Americans think of protesting as a small circle of people in front of some building chanting corny slogans. It is not. Look at France. Look at Serbia. Look at Turkey right now, FFS.
I’m not saying go be a weirdo chanting in a circle, I’m saying block the streets with masses of people, shut down the country, close down the shops, picket official buildings, cordon off vulnerable targets, blot out the goddamn sun.
You have done nothing as a country yet. The dumbass MAGA morons did more direct political action on Jan 6th than anybody else in the US since, what? BLM? I am astounded at the sense of dejection and powerlessness in the face of fascist ascendancy paired with some weird ritualistic economic self-immolation. You guys are SO. WEIRD. I don’t get it.