conuly

Thanks; I will pop over and say Hi to her!

The tragic truth is that in the event of a national emergency serious enough to disrupt pharmaceutical manufacture and distribution, the vast majority of people dependent for their lives on pharmaceutical medicines are going to die. The Type 1 diabetics don't have a prayer, because manufacturing enough insulin to keep even one of them alive is not really feasible at home when Civilization has not collapsed, and one can buy everything needed over the Internet. The people with high blood pressure would be dying like flies from heart attacks and strokes within a month of running out of medicine - and I might be one of them; I'm on the lowest possible dose, but I am on it. Everybody on 'maintenance' antibiotics, everybody on anti-viral treatment, everybody on statins, everybody dependent on an inhaler... that's a hell of a lot of people, and most of them would be goners, no saving throw.

*sighhh* Y'know, I've been thinking all this over since my early teens, when I had recurring, BluRay-vivid nightmares of leading a band of burned and dying children through the post-Apocalyptic ruins. Never in all my life have I believed that the 'American Way of Life' would out-last me, egregiouslyly unsustainable as it is, so I've been laying my plans to out-last it, and not by stupid, short-sighted 'survivalism' either. The fact is, the 'survivalists' are a primary threat to the rest of the populace, and if I were the CO of the local American armed forces, in the event of a collapse I would make it a priority to root (or if necessary blast) them all out of their fortified little bandit-holdings before they had time to become entrenched in them.

One of my daughter's former hopeless-contestant suitors was a young Marine who was just itching for Civilization to collapse so he can star in his own version of 'Red Dawn Meets I Am Legend'. (Not being much of a reader, apparently he missed Lucifer's Hammer, which might have wised him up a tiny bit.) This is a guy who never raised a single chicken in his life, let alone built the kind of chicken-fortress it takes to keep chickens in a varmint-rich ecosystem like ours. This is a guy who has never helped birth kittens, let alone sheep. This is a guy who barely knows where sugar comes from, and never heard that grain, hay and chaff all spontaneously combust if not stored 100% correctly.

Lee and I have shared gales of laughter over his absurd vision of himself as Master and Commander of a prosperous Heinleinian post-Apocalyptic community, but if the reality ever did come to pass, it wouldn't be so funny. Either he'd get a fucking clue and report for duty to whatever duly-constituted authority was left, or he'd end up a starving, desperate, dangerous marauder, and probably hurt a lot of innocent people before someone took him down - or the Wild killed him, which the Wild is extremely capable of doing without any help from humans.

Tell you what, it is HARD to make even a partially self-sustaining mini-farm from scratch in the Wild - even when one has a job that provides steady income, and a vehicle that can get up and down the mountain to the gas station, feed store and grocery store, and the ability to just buy tools, equipment, and building supplies, and a societal infrastructure that will not allow someone better-armed to just come in and take the place, or to plunder and burn it. It is damned hard and damned expensive, even if one knows what one is doing, which most of these brain-dead 'survivalists' certainly do not.
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