Oh TEOTWAWKI, where art thou?
I gave up the “news” on November 3, 2020 about 8 PM. During December I’d do a quick scan to see if there was any mention of mushroom clouds, then get back to more important things like trying to figure out how to get my hands on some Hoppes 1-8 to go along with my Hoppes 9. In 2021, I’ve given up all news (except the occasional link in another story) and both my sanity and quality of life have improved immensely. Friends and relatives will notify me of any mushroom clouds on the horizon.
One of the things I look forward to as each new day begins is reading SurvivalBlog with my morning coffee. A sincere thanks to Jim, Lily, and contributors for all your hard work to make SurvivalBlog possible.
Recently, several SurvivalBlog articles, snippets, and news links have gotten me thinking again about some old topics so I thought I’d share some thoughts I’ve pondered while weeding the garden and doing chores around the homestead. I’m sure most will probably disagree but these are mere opinions and observations so for those folks, I hope we can agree to disagree.
I’ve jokingly told my kids on many occasions that I want a quote on my tombstone which I call my own, but no doubt many others before me have uttered similar sentiments: “As individuals, human beings are the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened on planet Earth. As a species, the sooner we go extinct the better.”
There are dozens of reasons why I feel this way and history is replete with all the bad things we’ve been doing to each other since the beginning of time. But the single biggest reason I see on a daily basis is the fact that as a species, we’re just a big herd of sheep. Most of us lack the capacity for critical thinking (“You can’t reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into”) because throughout history, other than things like “don’t stick your hands directly into the fire to warm them,” truth hasn’t been necessary for our survival. What was important was being part of a tribe and going along with the tribe in order to maintain our membership, even if it meant tossing helpless virgins into calderas to appease the volcano gods. Tribe Trumps Truth and lone dogs didn’t survive for long.
Today, most normal people need the social interaction as well as the feelings of belonging that come from our membership in the various groups we attach ourselves. And both of these needs are important for most peoples’ psychological wellbeing. Our genetic makeup has built these characteristics into us but lamentably, those same genes make the pursuit of ultimate truth almost inconsequential. Because we’re sheep by nature, we’re willing to follow all kinds of “leaders” from Joseph Stalin to Jim Jones to Joe Biden, who can get us to do almost anything if they just touch the right emotional chords inside us.
Another reason why our species is a disappointment is that we’ve largely given up the spirit of independence and self-reliance in exchange for a government that takes advantage of us both financially and psychologically by promising to “take care of us” and “keep us safe.” Many of us, myself included, have ill feelings about freedom-quashing governments at all levels right down to our local city councils. We’d rather have them all get the hell out of our way and let us live our lives, protecting ourselves and providing for our families as we see fit as long as we don’t violate the rights of others in the process.
Is This Crazy?
So the big question I ask myself lately is, “Am I crazy for hoping that TEOTWAWKI happens on my watch, the sooner the better?” There’s no question I have some “crazy” ideas that keep my seat on the Group W bench well-polished, but IMO hoping for TEOTWAWKI isn’t one of them and is far more reasonable than merely hoping things will get better.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s when our so-called leaders had us convinced that nuclear war was imminent, there were three basic kinds of people I remember. Those who wanted the first bomb to hit directly on their house so they wouldn’t have to deal with nuclear war, those who wanted to live and try to make the best of it, and the tiny adventurous minority who said, “Bring it on baby!”
My contempt for government and my acceptance that our genetic makeup makes most of us sheep are the two main factors convincing me there’s no way to fix our issues, both as a country and as a world community, without a TEOTWAWKI event. I’ve heard all the arguments against that idea but the majority of them are emotional and not based on the realities we’re now facing. I disagree with every single one I’ve heard. All of them. Yes, I CAN give up hope because it’s the only rational approach to a hopeless situation. NO, voting doesn’t make a difference. Donald Trump couldn’t, and the next Republican president won’t, save us or our country any more than Joe Biden will.
It’s silly to think a population comprised increasingly of non-Christian, non-European immigrants have the slightest interest in maintaining or restoring “the Republic.” Rational thinkers gave up on that nonsensical idea long ago after observing demographic trends. The 2020 census showed that in the United States, a full 21.6% of homes in the US don’t even speak English as their first language. Let that sink into your conscience next time you get emotional about restoring the Republic. The ugly truth for the old-timers who still think we can make America great again is this: it’s not 1945, we didn’t just save the world in WWII, and the current baby boom isn’t among the white Christian, European-blooded stock who founded this country and populated it for 200+ years. Rather, it’s among the multicultural people of color who we’ve been handing the country over to for the past umpteen generations. And who can deny they deserve to inherit what we forsook when we decided to quit populating the country with our own progeny? Who can hold any animosity against the people who are working today so the government can steal money from their paychecks each week to pay our socialist security benefits and pensions every month?
The good old days are just that: old and in the past and not coming back any more quickly than Thomas Jefferson or Funny Face Koolaid. History tells me a TEOTWAWKI event is way more probable than fixing the mess our country and the world is in and having some of our lost “liberties” restored.
One of the things I love most about JWR’s Patriots novel series is that there’s no utterly disappointing ending as in Alas Babylon and One Second After where the infernal despicable government, the same one whose actions were responsible for causing TEOTWAWKI in the first place, comes to the rescue at the end to save all the sheep. Baa-a-a-a-a-a! Aaarrrgghhhhhh!
Expected Changes
So what do I hope TEOTWAWKI will change?
I love some of our modern technology: instant communications, solar panels, night vision goggles, GPS, DVDs, and the still-amazing-after-25-years knowledge base of the Internet where things which were formerly impossible to research can be learned in 15 minutes. Wow.
But technology has its downsides as well. Aside from all that which moved Orwell’s 1984 from the fiction to the non-fiction section of the library, possibly the worst result of technology on modern-day life is the 24-hour “news” cycle. Back when Walter Cronkite only had 30 minutes each night to sum up world events, only the most important real news stories could be covered. Reporters held to a much higher standard then and it was impossible to determine the political leanings of newscasters. Reporters also competed ferociously with one another to find that elusive Big Story whereas now they’re mostly interested in covering their favorite political party’s backside, the truth be damned.
Nowadays with the 24-hour news cycle, broadcasters and blogs have to keep coming up with new material every hour to keep listeners tuned in else they take their 30-second attention spans elsewhere. We’ve ruined an entire generation of parents and their children because the 24-hour news cycle allows reporting of the most intimate details of every single stranger child-abduction case where Walter Cronkite could only report once or twice a year on the most spectacular ones. Nowadays too many parents believe every single stranger wants to abduct their children. The reality? Stranger abductions of children are no more common in our day than they were 50 years ago, about 125 per year. That’s far fewer than the 200+ yearly average of lightning-strike victims.
The 24-hour news cycle has blown everything so out of proportion it makes the rare event seem commonplace, especially for a populace who uses emotion-based thinking instead of rational, critical thinking. To protect them from being abducted, kids are now imprisoned in yards with tall walls or ensconced inside the fortress playing computer games, more obese than ever and with the highest rate of juvenile diabetes in history due to inactivity and the highly-processed corn- and soy-based foods which make up the average American diet.
(To be concluded tomorrow, in Part 2.)