The_Dunedan

Awesome! Keep it going, it sounds like you guys are off to a great start between you. As for Pizza...yes. I agree. Should the world collapse, what are we talking for an 18" Pepperoni and garlic hand-tossed? Got a price in silver or ammo or sides of beef? Maybe a few folks to watch the place while you sleep or train people: pay a few guys in pizza and (off-duty) beer to keep an eye on your backyard?

Look, I think I should clarify something here. I'm not saying that people won't be able to continue living in a civil society after a catastrophe such as we're discussing. My point is that whatever happens, any society which survives long enough to regain or re-invent civility will be put through a period of severe trial. Those societies which do not so survive will become as extinct as Rome. Echoed in history, recalled at the edge of myth, but gone nonetheless to dust.

I spent a year living in the Czech Republic, and during my several visits to the Czech countryside at the invitation of my country-boy roomate, I got a good look at how the rural folks out there lived.

A basic home had a house which fronted the street or road, behind which was a 25-40 yard long by 10-15 yard wide back yard. There were usually two long walls with overhanging sheds down each side, and at the far end was a barn closing off the rectangle. Inside this large courtyard, you could find fruit trees, gardens, chicken runs, wood-fired bathtubs and showers, rabbit-hutches, herb-baskets hanging on the south-facing walls, wine- and cider-presses, moonshine stills, cannabis plants of a particularly disastrous local variety, goats, pigs, sheep, and even in one case a tired old coal-cart horse who was living out his well-earned retirement eating apples.

My roommate once said jokingly, but with the relaxed Czech expression that means a joke is a little serious, that "If terrorists come or something is bad in Prague, it's ok. We got to Moravia."

After seeing his hometown, I believe him. They had everything they could need: farms, processors, butchers, breweries and distilleries, food and drink and even a little local hospital. Everybody already traded favors and barter goods and rounds of drinks at the pub for other goods and services alongside the usual "cash" economy. It was the Czech way, and it served them well. Those people will survive nothing short of nuclear annihilation or invasion by Russian Bear Cavalry.

That's what you want, the ideal endgame for a social collapse or worldwide natural disaster: a cohesive group of people who co-operate to everyone's mutual individual benefit. It's just wise to account for the possibility that it might take a lot of work and a fair bit of bloodshed to distill something like that. The Czechs and Slovaks I met and visited were already there. People, even college kids, went "home to the country" a couple of times a month with their families and/or parents. When mushrooms came into season out in the woods and parks, much of Prague outside of the tourist district became a ghost town. When I explained that the people who are now my neighbors possessed three or four acres of land apiece and didn't even have gardens, the unfortunate Czech person on the other end experienced what I once saw described as "a paradigm shifting without a clutch." They simply didn't understand this: three acres and they'd done -nothing- with all this bounty? Even in the city, people grew herbs and tomatoes and cucumbers in window boxes on the south sides of apartment buildings or up on the rooves of nearly everything. Even office buildings had window-boxes sometimes.

The US is possessed of a far less resilient society. Less than 2% of our population lives on farms: our enormous urban beehives are supported mostly by equally enormous agricultural combines like Monsanto, which are highly vulnerable to economic and climatic disruption. Unlike Prague, which is supplied in basic staples from relatively nearby farms owned by families or small local businesses, no large American city is anywhere near close enough to a food source large enough to sustain its' population. Also unlike Prague: no major American city becomes a virtual ghost town on the weekends (as Prague, Brno, Mlada Boleslav, and virtually every other big city) as people of all ages head to the country to relax by cutting firewood, tending gardens, making cider and eating some home-cooked Soul Food Back Home With The Folks.

The unfortunate fact is that American culture is simply not as stable or sustainable as that in other countries where people have had it harder, survived, and remember the lot of it. Only a tiny minority of Americans have any idea how to really feed themselves. A somewhat larger, but still very small minority, know how to make raw materials into things people actually need to survive. There is very little true sense of community in America I find, because a true sense of community is built through shared struggle and hardship, and very few Americans yet know what real hardship is. When you find yourself at dinner with regular country folks who've killed and butchered and souped and made truly delicious a chicken from their backyard (while you waited and drank with the Menfolk), or been gifted with ten pounds of fresh sausage from somebody's pig Back Home, you know these people can survive anything. There is very little of that kind of thing left in most of the US. In order to recover civil society, it's going to take a re-discovery of that kind of mindset, and because the United States is an enormous neo-Roman instant-gratification orgy it may take quite a lot of very hazardous living as well. We even have a poster here on TFP who, besides admitting to being so radically unprepared to deal with Life as to not even posses a fire-extinguisher, has stated flat-out that in any civil disorder or collapse scenario he intends to become a looter/rioter, and that in the event of natural disaster he intends to sit on his arse and wait for help to arrive: although I suppose if the Help took its' time a riot would break out which he could join. There are an awful lot of people out there with that same mindset, and that worries me. People like that turn into MZB's in a big hurry.


Before It's News

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"I personally think that America's interests would be well served if after or at the time these clowns begin their revolting little hate crime the local police come in and cart them off on some trumped up charges or other. It is necessary in my opinion that America makes an example of them to the world."

--Strange Famous, advocating the use of falsified charges in order to shut people up.