We’re in that kind of weird, cold time between the seemingly unending holidays and Spring. I guess you could call it “Winter” except despite what I just said, it really hasn’t been all that cold. I’m sure February will come and kick us in the teeth at some point.
We’ve been very busy and haven’t been able to take as many of our regular walks around downtown. A few, but not many. We’ve had the opportunity to walk over to the new Wild Duck Bar & Grill on Fisk a few times and have enjoyed it very much. Y’all stop in and check that place out when you get the opportunity.
We did get to walk on Sunday, which was New Year’s Eve. Downtown was mostly deserted, and sometimes we talk about how eerie it is when there are no cars or people at all. Like a ghost town, but not with tumbleweeds and dust. More like a post-apocalyptic town after everyone has skedaddled. 2024 promises to be a pretty interesting year, but hopefully not that interesting.
Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic literature, movies, games, etc. have been all the rage over the past half-decade, understandably. I wrote a massive Apocalyptic novel called WICK (it should be available at Intermission Bookshop) that delves deeply into the psychology and philosophy of End of The World As We Know it scenarios.
Since most people are historically ignorant, we should call it THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE MIS-KNEW IT.
Having lived off-grid for 18 years, and having taught survival, homesteading, and preparedness topics for most of those years, I see things a little differently than most folks. That is – I see things as they are and not how dreamers wish that things are. Last night at our poker game the topic of these scenarios came up, and (I’m not being insulting, I am speaking a difficult truth) listening to “normies” talk about survival scenarios is somewhat like listening to pre-teenagers talk about what they are going to do when they grow up. I kept saying “The best tools you can have are knowledge and wisdom” (which comes from practically applied knowledge). That is to say, most (95%+) have no actual practical knowledge of how to live and survive without the artificial 72-degree protective womb of the modern, digital, electrical, industrial, consumer system. And that system is as speculative and vulnerable as the printer you had in the early 2000s that only worked when it wanted to. Only when this system breaks you won’t get just an error message. You’ll get hordes of entitled attorneys and accountants and clerks and welders who will be worse than any foreign army.
I guess the point is that when it comes to getting by when getting by is difficult (which means… like it was for everyone in the world for thousands of years before the last 100 or so), modern man is ill-prepared, physically or mentally, for hard times.
Thinking about things, studying them, and preparing yourself is not foolish, ghoulish, or a waste of your time. Avoiding the topic, dismissing it with comfortable claims of “blind faith” or “nothing bad to happen to me because God loves me more than the billions of other people who struggled out of the mire of death, war, slavery, human sacrifice, etc. to build a civilization” is just narcissistic theater. You’re not special. In fact, a case could be made that modern man deserves to have it much worse than his ancestors. But that’s just my opinion.
Your mileage may vary.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.