Thoughts on TEOTWAWKI

Or "the end of the world as we know it." I've known some people who are sort of preparing for that. I think it is futile. Short-term breakdown of society after a natural disaster, on the order of a few weeks, is survivable with some preparation. Even medium-term, over a number of months, is doable. But a complete irreversible breakdown is not. This is why:

First off, everything you have becomes irreplaceable. If you cannot grow it or make it out of locally-obtainable raw materials, it becomes a zero-sum item and, therefore, priceless. Salt, sugar, flour, sewing needles and thread, toilet paper, canned food, band-aids, kerosene, pencils, ammunition, the list goes on and on. Everything electronic will be worthless in short order, anyway, as batteries give out. Think of nails, those things that you can buy cheaply in a five-pound box at a hardware store. In colonial days, if you were building a new house, it was common practice to burn the old one to ashes in order to recover the iron nails. Wood was available locally, nails had to be imported.

Second, if you were to try and grow your own food, you would have to plant everything by hand, weed by hand, harvest by hand, and store it from predation. You can forget about using horses, most of them will be eaten and even if you have one, you probably do not have the harnesses and equipment necessary to plow a field with a horse. You don't have the hand scythes necessary to cut the acres of grass to make hay so the horse won't starve between October and April.

If you live in a rural area, you might have a chance. You might have a horse and some old equipment to use. But do you have the parts to fix the plow, do you have the leather to make new harnesses, and so on? Do you have the skills to do that? In the suburbs and the cities, forget it.

Don't get cut. Life will be harder and dirtier and that means that even a small cut can easily become a fatal infection. (One of the reasons why people wore so many clothes prior to the 20th Century was for protection against cuts and abrasions.) A pair of ill-fitting shoes can kill you. Leather gloves are your friends.

A word on weapons: The most useless weapon will be a centerfire rifle. Rifles require that they be within arm's reach at all times to be useful and few people will do that. If you need to defend yourself, you cannot count on any advance warning-- if the weapon is not at hand, it might as well be on the far side of the world. Second, firing a centerfire rifle announces to everyone within a radius of two miles or so that there may be be something worth trying to take.

A pistol will be your friend. In a short or medium term scenario, count on the rule of law being reimposed, people may be held accountable for their actions and quite possibly by a harsh form of justice. If you do things such as shoot people at long range without damn good justification, you might end up stretching a rope with your neck.

A lot of stuff out there about survivalism is somewhere in between fiction, fantasy, and the ravings of insanely paranoid people. Use your brains, think it out.