But perhaps quite close. And perhaps yes in places other than the U.S.
My father sent me this video this morning:
Which stirred up this set of thoughts in turn:
Well, it's interestingly dire. I'd like to know more about what he thinks the contributing factors to the collapse will be. They mention here hyperinflation of the style we see in modern Zimbabwe or the lead up to the French revolution. There could be something to that.
I think the US does one thing very right that goes a long way to forestalling the most apocalyptic scenarios: We run a food surplus with subsidies ensuring capacity to expand production as needed. When I look at the worst government scale disasters, most of the big ones have one thing in common: Someone thought they could rework the whole farming system as an outsider, and a collapse of food production ensued. I'm talking about Stalin's terror famine here, Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, or Mugabe's current collapse in Zimbabwe. Once you have a sudden surge of people who can't get one of the basic necessities of life: food, clean water, and shelter, your economy truly goes in the tank.
Consider:
The US has just about the most clean water of anywhere in the world. We still flush our toilets, wash our dishes, and water our lawns with water that's been purified to drinkable levels. Most places in the world see this as insanity. You recall the distinction between "wasser" and "trinkwasser" in the German language. Just because water comes out of a pipe doesn't mean it's drinkable most places in the world.
We're a net exporter of food, with the capacity to expand production.
Our current crisis is rooted in having an excess amount of shelter built.
The many layers of luxury we've built on those firm foundations may collapse, and Americans as a whole have little concept of the many shades of bad. We may think it's terrible. All I'm saying is that we've got some hedges against the true worst.
What's important from this observation is that we don't let the ensuing panic motivate someone to take the step that results in the worst collapse: Allowing someone to throw a wrench into the farming system. If Monsanto or one of the other linchpins of the farming economy gets it in their head to snag some extra profit in the upcoming chaos, we might see a virtual food shortage, leading to the same effect. Keep your eyes open.
On further consideration, mass unrest could also be stirred up by enough people going into poverty to break the US' social safety nets. But I stand by the suspicion that it will get much worse other places than here, and that we'll whine and think the end is coming the whole time regardless, because no one presently living might have ever had it so bad, mild as that is.
Point the first: I have some fondness for reading.
Point the second: I will soon be compressing my possessions down to a backpack.
Point the third: The kindle is, to all reports, a workable substitute for conventional books, while being smaller and lighter than even a humble library. It runs longer on less power by orders of magnitude and is readable under more lighting conditions than a laptop.
The fact that I've even vocalized this suggests that I've already failed my save vs. shiny.
why are you trying to fit your life into a backpack? are you going to hike the AT with my husband from georgia to maine? i wish i could get my life to fit into a backpack. maybe someday we will both be able to do it. i miss coffee with you. ps i havent drank in a while and am doing really well for the most part miss you
Indeed. Superhumanly nerdy, even. I expect to be able to shoot lasers of binary out of them any day now. And with the enemies I will surely garner, I will have to defend myself with a pocket protector shield.
