Mormons are supposed to keep two years’ worth of food stored away. Certainly not all of my LDS friends adhered to this (tough when you’re a grad student, for instance), but some of them did. Despite living in incredibly cramped quarters, they had most of a back room neatly packed with boxes filled with boxes of preserved food, and things like grain mills so they could process more. They not only had the food and supplies on hand, they could also perform several of the tasks needed to tansform wild foods into edible and storable stuff. Those folks could probably pull through a moderate-sized disaster and come out on top.
Assistant Coach - Mormon
Assistant Principal - Mormon, married to Assistant Coach
Various students - Mormon, including son of the above
Heavily Mormon community - check
Have I been staying on good terms with all of the above - Hmmmm. Time to bake brownies for the AP.
Looking around the house I can see all sorts of tools my grandmother used that are strictly decorative now, but are still in perfest working order. Coffee grinder with spare parts, several butter churns, spice mills, etc. We’ll get by.
How long can you stay awake for without someone watching your back? How long will you survive trying to raid other potentially armed households? Society has nothing to do with “polite”. It has to do with you can’t provide all your needs - food, shelter, clothing, security - by yourself otherwise that’s ALL you will be doing every second of the day.
Besides, if you really believe you are capable of blowing away some family to keep yourself fed, you should get yourself checked in the head. People act in a moral way because it is the right thing to do. Sociopaths act in a moral way (or at least they don’t act immorally) because they don’t want to be punished.
Lissa - I’m as city slicker as they come and I’m pretty sure I could figure most of it out. Although I was in the Boy Scouts as a kid and went to summer camp and been camping a few times so I do know how to build a fire (with matches or a lighter, from wood in theory), I can fire a gun or bow well enough to kill a stupid deer eating from an overturned trashcan (I kick ass at Big Buck Hunter).
The trick is where the heck do I get a gun from?
Which is why I said “we” instead of “I.” We are a small but plucky group.
If you would let your wife die because you wouldn’t steal food to keep her alive, then my opinion of your “morality” drops off the charts. The “right thing to do” is condition and set by society. Remove the society, and it’s every person for themselves. New Orleans proved that. Morals are a construct, not an absolute. Those who stand on their morals to protect them in a survival situation are nothing but victims. Would I kill to feed my family? It wouldn’t be my first choice, if for no other reason than it attracts attention. But if it was the only alternative? Without a second thought, quickly and cleanly.
Lissa - I’m as city slicker as they come and I’m pretty sure I could figure most of it out. Although I was in the Boy Scouts as a kid and went to summer camp and been camping a few times so I do know how to build a fire (with matches or a lighter, from wood in theory), I can fire a gun or bow well enough to kill a stupid deer eating from an overturned trashcan (I kick ass at Big Buck Hunter).
The trick is where the heck do I get a gun from?
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I’m an experienced hunter and outdoorsman. In a widespread natural disaster that meant no electricity or gas/sewer or other utilities working hunting would be the last thing on my mind.
It’s just not as sustainable as people in this thread seem to think it is. Every hunting season a sizeable portion of the deer herd is taken here in New England. It bounces right back because deer tend to have twins each year. But, keep in mind, this is just hunters doing recreational hunting that’s highly regulated.
In an emergency situation when food runs out, even if only the 10% of the population that hunts is killing all the game they can get that will drain the forests of everything quickly.
The other thing is the sheer scale of the number of people who need to eat. I don’t know how we could figure these stats, but if you killed every single deer in New England I doubt it would feed all the people for even a year.
I’d be eating canned foods and raiding supermarkets before I started hunting. Then you’d have a long tought time to wait for other people to die off before you could switch to a living off the land sort of lifestyle, if ever. The key would be to get out to where there weren’t many people in the first place like northern Maine. Then there might be enough game to support the existing population.
I think being prepared and having water, firearms, and survival skills are important in surviving for the short term. However, to make it long term you would need to have a community of like minded people working together. Not only working to help eachother produce food and goods, but to band together to protect themselves from the wandering mobs of millions of refugees raiding anything they can get their hands on. The Mormons might actually do OK.
I didn’t say anything about stealing food. I am talking about going and killing some other family to feed yours.
As I said, only for psychos.
“Society” or “civilization” is not a thing. It is a group of people deciding that mutual cooperation is better than every person for themselves. If people decide to create a society, there is society. If people choose to live Mad Max style, there’s anarchy.
Oh whatever. :rolleyes:
Personally, I’m of the opinion if you need to go and kill your neighbors or eat unwary travelers to survive, the situation has deteriorated to the point where you are truly and completely fucked. You are only delaying the enevitable because either no one is rebuilding society or if they are you aren’t apparently a part of it.
Interesting how you can parse the two. So you would rob someone for food, but not do so armed? Or if you would do so at gunpoint, you wouldn’t use the gun if physically opposed?
“The best of us did not survive.” - Viktor Frankl, The Search for Meaning
I believe that in a catastrophic situation (when civil order breaks down), those who survive well will be those who make a tribe of their choosing and defend it. Whether that tribe is family-unit based or community-based, when you have enough people to split the labor of survival, it will go well for you. Some can hunt, some can defend, some can gather, etc.
It’s very easy to say what you would never do when you have a full belly.
Well, you have an advantage that a lot of people don’t have: you’re smart. I doubt that it’s escaped your notice that most people aren’t. This isn’t elitism talking-- this is simple fact. There are a hell of a lot of people who can’t figure out simple mechanisms which have the directions clearly posted on it, let alone how to hunt, dress and prepare their own game. Granted, it’s not a life-or-death situation, but I think a lot of people would find themselves utterly helpless once the conveniences of modern life were stripped away. Survival requires creative thinking and sadly, there are a lot of people who lack that skill.
These are the dangerous ones. If they had access to a weapon, they’d probably use it to strong-arm food from their neighbors before they’d think about hunting.
Go to your local museum. As long as it’s not specifically a gun museum, it’s likely that it’d be overlooked by looters, at least for a while. Many museums accept donations of modern weapons, and they’d also likely have well-maintained muzzle-loaders. While you’re there, pick yourself up some cooking utensils and tools.
You can survive without a community. The early pioneers did it. It’s a hard and unrewarding life, but it can be done, especially if you plan for contingencies. In fact, I’d argue that it’d probably be safer to avoid forming a community, at least for a few years. Those “like-minded” folks who were your friends last week would be perfectly willing to kill you to steal what you have if they ran out of food. I think isolation would be the key to survival, at least until all of the stupid and desperate people died off.
It’s simple human nature. Take three people and they’ll make one a leader. Take five people, and they’ll make one an outcast. A group of ten will re-invent prejudice. Being part of a community means surrendering part of your independence, and if you’ve got the misfortune to fall in with a group that has a charismatic idiot as their leader, you’re fucked along with everyone else. (Worse, if you’ve argued, you’ll become the outcast and be blamed for all of the misfortune and they’ll think you’re hoarding food because you’re not a “team player” and kill you.)
In an apocalypse, everyone becomes psychos.
When I was a kid, there was the Cabbage Patch Kids craze. Remember those dolls? They’re coming back now. Every time I see one in the store, I remember what I saw at Christmas during their peak popularity. Two women actually got into a fight over the last doll, scratching at each other’s eyes, pulling hair and punching whatever they could reach. If they hadn’t been forcibly seperated by security, I think they would have inflicted serious damage to one another.
And that was over a doll. That wasn’t the last of the food.
I betcha that those women were probably perfectly “normal” most of the time, polite to strangers and living within society’s boundries. But the notion of scarcity and* wanting *something was enough to overpower their inhibitions.
This isn’t the only example I’ve seen of this. When the XBox 360 was released, there was a stabbing in my local Wal-Mart. Yes-- a guy actually pulled out a knife and stabbed the man in line in front of him to take his XBox. The victim wasn’t badly wounded, but it just shows you the lengths people are willing to go to even under normal circumstances.
Add in stravation and uncertainty and most people would probably be willing to stab someone. If not, they’re the ones being stabbed.
“Society” or “civilization” is a luxury of wealth that you don’t find among hungry, frightened people. You’re only fucked if you’re not willing to do what it takes to survive. Society will rebuild-- once they have the wealth and comfort which allows it. When you strip away our veneer of polite behavior, you’ll find that we’re really just animals.
Morality is not innate. A child raised in an enviornment where survival of the fittest is the norm doesn’t have some inborn sense that he should share and empathise. (You can find quite a few examples of this in your local prison.) We behave politely under most circumstances because that’s what we’ve been taught to do, and it works within normal situations. It’s a sort of reciprocity, and we make outcasts of those who don’t play by the rules.
But when the game changes, so do the rules. You can either adapt, or sit around bemoaning the demise of common courtesy until someone bashes you over the head to take your chair. There is no more reciprocity. There is no more “society” and there won’t be until we have the leisure time to invent new rules of polite behavior.
I don’t think the people who have a vague idea of what they think they should do, and figure that they could learn if they needed to, would last very long. I suspect that it would be the people who already know what to do, and are properly equipped, would be the ones to come out ahead right out of the box.
I mean, sure, you could learn to start a fire based on concepts, and you could go get a gun and learn to hunt after you had to, but you’d get awfully cold and hungry while doing so. And that’s only accounting for the learning curve without outside interference; once the factor of those of us who do already know what to do and have the proper tools and can get there first is figured in…
I know that I wouldn’t want to be supporting some stranger who didn’t know his ass from his elbow without some beneficial skills on his part; I would be too busy looking out for my own family. Why would knowing some mormons or other people who are adequately prepared save you? Should they deplete their resources to the point of uselessness in order to save the ill-equipped hordes counting on their goodwill?
Dear god, no, we’d be fucked. We’d have to either barricade ourselves into our house and die of starvation or leave the area altogether. I live in Richmond CA and I bet there would be a crime spree from hell.
Although we have lots of excellent camping and hiking gear complete with water filter and iodine tablets so once we got out of the immediate area we might do OK just hiking over the hills to get out of the bay area. I have enough knowledge of wild food and medicinal plants and the like to get us up and over the hills. It’s about 40 miles to my dad’s house, I bet we could do it in just a couple days.
Somehow, I think that if something is destructive enough to turn the USA or the world into one big failed state, it won’t really matter how much you prepare. Your survival will largely be a matter of luck and circumstance. The more supplies you have stockpiled the greater a target for looters and bandits you will be. How long can you hole up before you turn all wierd and isolated like Tim Robbins in War of the Worlds?
Hell, I’m wierder than that now! 
Lissa - The paragraph you quoted was by msmith537, not me. Blame my lousy coding for that one. But I do agree with your sentiments.
Undoubtably luck and circumstance will play a major role in who survives or not. But I believe in helping Luck along whenever I can.
And that’s different that life now because of what? 
Hunting? Guns?
Not in my part of the world. There aren’t many guns around (I don’t own any), and I live in a big city. The city is surrounded by inhospitable and rugged terrain on three sides, and ocean on the fourth. There are only a few roads out, and it’d be a walk of a hundred or more miles before you get to open farmland, and Australian countryside is marginal. If I was out there, then there’s kangaroos, rabbits, etc (if I had a gun, and wasn’t shot by one of the locals who would no doubt band together to repel the hoards of city folk), but I’m not out there, and I’d say I’d find myself stuck in a post-apocalyptic metropolis with some pretty ugly things going on. I reckon rats would be a prime source of meat, given the piles of garbage and bodies. Rats, dogs, cats, pigeons, and human flesh. The waterways would be fished out pretty quickly, I think.