Sir:
I have been trying to paint mental pictures of men, women, and children scouring the countryside for food and fuel, arriving/crashing through the gate to my property, intent on their own survival.
They are hungry, desperate, and in a panic state of mind. I have tried to picture myself shooting warning shots over their heads, hearing them scream and curse at me, and hopefully going away.
I have Dakota Alerts in place for early detection during the night. I had dogs, but they are shot or beaten to death early on in the nightmare scenario.
But the alarms keep going off, and I know that there is movement on my property, and they are close at hand. I pour some semi-auto [fire] out of a window into the darkness to scare them off, and they move on.
But it continues for weeks. The trucking of supplies to us from Mexico has taken much too long, as the main highway system is chaos, and the ports that remain functional have bogged down from a myriad of logistical problems. Canada is doing what it can for the Northern U.S., but law and order have vanished in my area.
Then the pounding on the doors begins, and with some shots and threats. Things have deteriorated to the point to where looters do not care if they are killed. They are miserable
and almost dead already. So now the killing begins, and they will certainly kill me if that is what it takes to get some food and supplies. The Mad Max movie has begun, but it is not theatrical.
If I am to survive, I must take drastic actions.
The psychology/mindset of survival is something I am coming to grips with. It is something so foreign to me, having lived in a wonderland of plenty for so long,
that it is shocking to the senses. It is warfare, but an x-rated dirty and disgusting picture of humanity at its most primitive. How does one imagine barbarians crashing down upon a once civilized culture, reducing the lifestyle to one of filth, starvation, horror, and blood. A ghastly life of violence and suffering and riot; catastrophic losses and degradation to the point of madness and murder. Seeing ones family members huddled together in fear and weeping. Digging pits for the bodies that were killed during the night, remembering their screams and moans, knowing that packs of wild dogs will be trying to dig them up the next night. I could go on, but won’t.
I think we can arm ourselves, and have a quite content attitude about how much storage food we have. But, there is the emotional aspect of survival that I am trying to deal with. Does your book ““Patriots”] help here? – Martin P.
JWR Replies: Yes, you will find that my novel “Patriots” is quite helpful in thinking through retreat security and some of the psychological aspects of TEOTWAWKI. In it, I describe some practical and tactical methods for retreat security in a “worst case”. In fact, there are some strategies and tactics presented in the novel that I’ve never seen presented elsewhere. In all of my writings, I have stressed the importance of relocating to a lightly-populated region that is well removed from major metropolitan regions. In the event of a full scale societal collapse, the nightmarish circumstances that you describe will be likely in the cities and in the suburbs, but they are thankfully far, far less likely out in the hinterboonies. In essence, fewer people means fewer problems.