Smashing the Cities

A reader commented on the previous post, McGee Speaks:

Should we be stocking up on supplies before you start smashing, or is this just an offhand comment?


The paragraph is from  The Green Ripper, written in 1978 or '79 about Travis' personal response to an act of terrorism. The threat MacDonald  posited emanated from a perverted form of Christianity fronting for Communism and the same  Middle-East forces which threaten us today. It is an ageless reflection on  the relationship between  advanced technology (running water, for instance) and increased societal vulnerability.


In a sense, it is also a reflection on people in general. On each new day our good lives depend a little more fully on competence and good will of of countless people we've never me.  Air traffic controllers, guards and engineers of the power grid, internet enablers, the police system,  a financial lashup which profits from general ignorance,  the political system which has taken it on itself to ensure everything works and everyone happy.


So far, despite some horrible lapses, this has worked well enough in the First World, but there is a cost. The price is measured is  units of self-sufficiency which are lost to a blind and unthinking reliance on the system and an almost universal negligence of personal Plans B, C, D, and beyond.  


New Orleans died after a wholly predictable act of nature, and everyone blamed everyone else.  Facebook went down last week and it was top-line news.  Impure eggs got to market and a million words were expended advising the population to cook eggs, as though hundreds of millions of Americans were blind to the simple truths of the natural world, which is close enough to truth to frighten me. 


Assuming the correctness of every biologist, anthropologist,  ethicist I ever read that personal survival is the ultimate human drive, I wonder at the popular refusal to recognize the corollary: Living to see next month is a personal responsibility. 


When the grid goes down are we ready with battery lamps, then kerosene lanterns, then candles, then  twisted thistle fiber stuck in a clam shell of bacon grease?  (Can you and your neighbors catch, kill, and butcher a hog, then render out the fat?) 


When the water tower is empty do we have a pre-determined source of water, a way to carry it, store it, boil it? Do we have a personal plan to protect it when the police run away, speaking of New Orleans? 


Against the day when the satellites go dark, do we have a map to replace the GPS, a personal library to fill in for the electric teevee -- not to mention the ability to converse with other humans when Sister Oprah is no longer our best friend and primary source of wisdom?


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All that is part of what McGee was wondering about, as we should.


The "you" in your comment is misguided, perhaps unintentionally.   The  smashers are my enemy.  Meyer the economist, in the same book, outlines a gloomy view of  the near future. However:


"What the sane people people and sane governments are trying to do is scuffle a little more breathing space, a little more time before the collapse. ... I'm one of the scufflers. Cut and paste. Fix the world with paper clips and rubber bands." 


Still, yes, I think it is a good idea to be laying in a few supplies. Starting  in about 1992 if not earlier.