Editor’s note: Here is another article by our friend, Ruricolus.
Yesterday on April 20th I got my electric bill for this month — which was dated April 1st, and which I already paid online on April 9th. So I called them this morning just to make sure my payment was recorded. The nice lady explained that a bunch of their bills got lost in a post office in St. Louis for a couple weeks, so everyone’s been calling saying what the hell, and they’ve promised they won’t be charging any late fees for this month. At the end of the call, she said verbatim, “It’s not like it used to be, is it?”
No, it certainly is not. Postal service, at least around here, used to be solid as a rock. Why was a bill from a co-op 20 miles away going through a St. Louis post office 100 miles away in the first place? I looked at the envelope: postmarked as mailed from Winston Salem, NC. So at some point, someone at the local electric co-op, a local business which has provided good service and good jobs in the area for 80 years, decided to save some money by having their invoices printed half a continent away. Why not, everyone was doing it. So now they’re dependent on diverse postal workers in St. Louis, and they don’t even know those people have screwed up until they start getting confused and pissed off phone calls from their neighbors.
The little things are breaking down because they’ve been made fragile in the quest for efficiency and reduced costs, and because bad choices have dragged down the competent workforce that made them work. We can no longer assume that an envelope mailed will get to its destination in a reasonable time. That there will be toilet paper on the shelves when we go shopping. That a bridge we’re driving across won’t collapse. That a vote we cast will be counted.
We have to be prepared, not just physically in terms of food and ammo, but psychologically, so that we’re not surprised and discouraged when the systems around us break. That’s just how it’s going to be now. We may maintain things in our local communities, but even there the fragility brought on by outside dependencies will show up in the cracks. We have to be mentally prepared for things to break, not just so it doesn’t get us down, but so that we can take advantage of it.
and then Atlas shrugged… do the best you can getting mentally prepped cause it aint getting better soon
Good one. I was thinking about Atlas Shrugged while reading this. A very good book on how things will be getting worse as time goes by.
I was hoping you would give tips on “how to take advantage of it”.
But i agree with you sir!
Jack Amok is right. It might take a mechanical engineer to predict a bridge collapse, it might take a Ludwig von Mises to predict the Great Depression. But after the disaster, everyone knows something went wrong. Their itching ears are an opportunity for bad guys to tell lies, and an opportunity for good guys to tell the truth.
How to take advantage, that could probably be an entire series, but I suspect most ways will have two parts when something breaks:
1 – make sure the local community sees how helpless the existing power structure is to solve the problem
2 – then show them your group can solve it.
I was down in my valley field hiding in the bush waiting on Mr Fox to come by . He has killed his last bird on my farm. As I watched the postal worker open my mailbox and drop my mail in he had a large Amazon package that he examined . He looked upset as he read the label and discovered he should have delivered it two miles previously . After looking all around to check for witnesses he threw the package into my field where it fell up against the corner post of the gate to my field . After another hour of waiting on that very sly Fox I walked over and picked up the package . It belonged to a very sweet but disabled old lady and I took it over to her . Government at its finest !
We live in a third world country that still retains vestiges of a first world country and a population that hasn’t become cognizant of that fact yet. I believe that looking into daily life in places such as Mexico and Venezuela would be beneficial due to the fact that they are third world countries and the United States has a massive population of Mexicans. Many of these Mexicans are first or second generation and retain the routine, habits and skills beneficial for survival in a third world environment and will quickly revert back and do ok putting them at an advantage, while the closest a European American could relate are stories of times during the horrible (great) depression generations ago; unless a person experienced life in a country formerly under Soviet control.
Security, food, clean water and medicine acquisition without a supply chain or cash will make or break many and the roving gangs of White hating melanin rich bipeds will be a constant concern. Using this time to consider these things and gain the knowledge and skills necessary to not be in a situation where asking for help is your only option, help that may not exist, is how I regularly devote some time and suggest the same for others.
This is said assuming you have submitted yourself to Christ, your King, as that is the most crucial preparation one can have. This entire world is transitioning to a one world scenario (govt, money, religion, ect) and will not right itself. We are tasked to endure until the end. God speed Brothers.