Maker of Things Not Kings
Maester
I do not understand why the richest countries in the world are not equipped to deal with it. I'm not talking on a medical level, I'm talking every level.
I think this to comes down to a lack of any sort of awareness and readiness on a personal/individual level too.
I can recall, as a child, my grandparents had a room in the basement we called the spare room. In addition to the garden tools and lanterns and the such, it had shelves filled with canned food, peanut butter, tea bags, flour and sugar etc. like a small grocery store. There were also jars of all sorts of things my grandmother canned and put up each year. They grew up through the WWI/Influenza outbreak and then the US Great Depression so it was considered common sense to be ready for any potentially lean times. They also paid cash for everything and never ran a credit line in their entire lives.
My mother, who was a child of the era of household convenience, was taught this same way of doing things though she, like most kids, rejected a lot of that common sense as old fashioned. She had a sensible approach to credit and saved money.
Then I came along and thought I knew better. Saved little, charged a lot. I Learned the hard way and realize now that my grandparents had so much of it right and now live like they did.
And here, two generations later, we have people who are running revolving debt, cannot save a dime and never think about the possibility of short supply or not being able to do what they want every day. And we are a culture of extremes.
Preppers would tell you they can outlast the apocalypse but many of them are more concerned with the optics of being a prepper than just the sensibility of being somewhat better equipped to handle a change in day to day life. My grandparents certainly never bragged about their practical readiness. When i was a kid, in the 80's, we once had three feet of snow over two days and couldn't get out of the house for nearly a week, we never even gave it a second thought.
I'm just old enough to remember: Banks giving as much as 6 and 7% annual interest TO YOU for saving money. Rabbit ear antennas and TV that you had to get up and change the channel manually to switch to any of the four or five stations that came in somewhat clear enough to see. Adjusting the horizontal and vertical hold while moving said antenna around. The first, bulky, microwave ovens. Rotary phones, answering machines with a tape in them. The days of no personal calls at work, let alone cell phones, and payphones on every other street corner. Mix tapes you had to have two tape recorders to make and making electronic music with a Moog, early MIDI and an Atari computer that had a whopping 1 MB of RAM onboard (that WAS futuristic then by the way! ) Cars before power steering and braking were standard. Knowing the bus routes in my city by number as well as every stop by site. Memorizing all of your friend's phone numbers. Pumping gas before safety valves kept the gas tank from overfilling and dowsing you with gasoline. People syphoning gas from one tank to put in another with their mouth and a hose. Riding as a child in my mother's car with no seat belts or child seats. My grandmother grinding meat to make sausage or nuts for a pastry in a rotary, hand grinder and kneading all of her dough by hand. Ribbon manual typewriters! (Still have one of those to this day!)
That was all NORMAL and part of every day life once.
My point is that the world changes so fast and while i appreciate soooo much of our modern world, there is no doubt it has made us less capable to handle anything that our ancestors would have called slightly less than "normal life". Dealing with scarcity. Living within our means. Frugality.
Right now, I'm glad that I figured that all out more than a decade ago and I find myself not wanting to think about where I'd be if I were still that 20 something kid who had no clue what my spending habits, credit debt and carefree, live-for-today lifestyle would reveal about my perpetual vulnerability in such a crisis. I'm not knocking people here, just realizing how the lull of complacency and the sense of security that our modern world of accessibility and ready-availability has created may not be so great for many folks in the end.
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