(Continued from Part 2. This conclude4s teh article.)
STAGE 2: SURVIVAL MODE
The survival phase is the intermediate period between the very short-term emergency phase and the time when things finally settle down to the New Normal phase.
Once everyone is finally gathered together at the homestead, defenses set up, the freezer contents are canned, freeze dried, smoked, or those blueberries made into cobbler as a comfort food during those first few stressful days, and once we’ve got meals back to some sort of a schedule, chores divvied out, watch times established, and water and propane conservation rules tacked to the wall, we can begin to relax just a little as we transition into survival mode.
The more quickly we can move from emergency mode to survival mode, the better off we’ll be. While some in our group naturally worry more than others, the majority of the group will be calmly approaching what lies ahead. We know we have enough supplies and preps to take care of our basic needs. Now our biggest concern will be to ensure our group’s survival by defending it all.
We’ll need to be ready defense-wise from the first hour of Day One. Not necessarily because we’ll have to be defending our homesteads that early in the game, but to begin transitioning over to a defense mindset which most of us have never been in before. No later than the end of the second week, things will be likely be serious enough that we’ll have to actually start physically defending our homesteads and pantries even if it’s just with some warning shots. We’ll be defending them with deadly force from that day on until the majority of the unprepared have dwindled away. Some will die from starvation, others at the hands hungry neighbors, and many by small groups of local undesirables who’ve banded together to take by force whatever they need to survive.
I don’t picture, as some do, hordes of people heading to the country because they think farmers all have big gardens and lots of food. I picture this only happening in large commercial agricultural areas where there are silos full of grains and soybeans, potato-storage warehouses, etc. I picture the multitudes concentrating on distribution warehouses full of foods waiting to head to grocery stores.
The biggest problem food-wise in my area, will be preserving small cattle and goat herds, mostly from locals at first. Unless cattle farmers team up with their neighbors, they’ll be unable to defend their herds by themselves. If some sort of a round-the-clock watch isn’t set up, cattle will be taken, then mostly wasted as the majority of the meat will go to waste when thieves don’t know how to preserve it. With neighbors banding together to protect cattle herds, the meat can be butchered as needed and conserved in a manner that will best ensure the longest-term food source possible.
The local game such as deer and elk, will mostly go to waste. In my county I’d expect 98% of the deer and turkeys to be gone in less than 30 days. People won’t want to band together and harvest game as needed, everyone will worried about getting their share before it’s all gone. Even in my area with a hunting culture and the use of game bags, I would expect much of the meat to go to waste without refrigeration. Most will have no practical experience in preserving meat the old-fashioned way by smoking, drying for jerky, salting, etc. Few will have time to get it all preserved quickly enough and much of it will go to waste. The feces hitting the fan in the wintertime will help delay meat spoilage in many parts of the country.
HOW LONG WILL THE SURVIVAL STAGE LAST?
How long the survival phase would last is the million-dollar question and anyone’s guess. No two areas will be the same. It would depend on a variety of factors such as what kind of event caused the Schumer to hit the fan in the first place, whether it’s slow-motion or a sudden event, and perhaps most importantly, what time of year it happens. Anything that could be called a TEOTWAWKI event would almost certainly result in a grid-down world.
It would take a book-length article to discuss all the possibilities and variables, but if the post-SHTF situation is anything like the ones depicted in the movies and literature, minus the impossibility of the military showing up to save the day, in my opinion I don’t think the survival phase would last very long, most likely 4-6 months at best, and much less if the SHTF during the winter. Whatever the time frame, some estimates are as high as 90% of the US population would die during the first year of a grid-down world. I lean toward the 90% figure for reasons outlined in my next article “A Realistic Top-10 Prepping List.” The die-off rate would be best graphed as a reverse hockey stick with a heavy die-off in the beginning.
TYPES OF PEOPLE WANTING OUR FOOD
Of those who’ve done little or nothing to prepare, I picture three kinds of people.
First, “decent people” who would run out of food, then ask friends and neighbors for some, then lay down to peacefully die after they have no more food options. The second group, the “nice people,” would ask for food, then eventually get nasty about it when people say no. When they get to that point they’ll do whatever it takes to survive. The third group consists of that small minority of scoundrels down the road who, once they started getting hungry, would ask nicely just one time, then take by force whatever we have if we’re not willing to share. Some members of these two groups will form into bands of rovers of one sort or another. These bands of desperadoes would make it necessary for us to do whatever it takes to protect our families and supplies, and will unquestionably require the use of deadly force.
The main reason I see the survival phase being as short as I do is that I can’t picture bands of rovers lasting very long. First, the “decent” people, who I like to think are the majority, for the most part would have run out of food before rovers could form bands and take any from them. The “nice” and the scoundrels, some forming into bands, will rapidly confiscate all food they can get their hands on. By attrition, any food easily obtainable by force would quickly run out in rural areas as well as urban. Rovers would have a harder time getting food from the few who still have any: well-defended preppers. In turn, those same preppers would be decreasing the numbers of thieves with well-placed defensive shots. Once the easy food is gone, rovers will begin to cannibalize any survivors they can find, then begin working their way up from the bottom of their own groups, cannibalizing the weakest first. Those members of the rover groups who see what’s coming would escape and either starve to death or be caught and consumed.
History tells us there’s no question that cannibalism will be going on once the food runs out. If decent people like those in the Argentine rugby team who crashed in the Andes, the Donner Party, the Israelites under the siege of Samaria, and most recently in some of our lifetimes, the siege of Leningrad and the Chinese citizenry under Chairman Mao, can turn to cannibalism to stay alive, why wouldn’t a band of repulsive plunderers do the same after all the easy pickings are gone? One member of the Donner party described human flesh as sweeter than beef and more preferable. With limited food in the first place, how would cannibals keep their victims alive long enough as a “herd” so each could make their way into the stew pot at an even enough rate to keep the renegades constantly fed? And how many rovers will a single cannibalized person feed?
Eventually, roving groups large and small would run out of food to steal, survivors to eat, and many would have been killed by those defending their homesteads, families, and supplies. I personally don’t picture these bands of rovers being especially well armed, trained, or organized in the first place. Therefore, those preppers who are armed will have a large advantage over the majority of roving bands.
So, the big question is, how long would it take well-prepared preppers to get through the emergency and survival modes? How long before society gets to some sort of a New Normal with small groups of survivors freely associating and bartering without fear of strangers ruining the party?
It would take however long it takes to get rid of the unprepared undesirables. Personally, in most areas I don’t picture that taking very long, maybe months at best and more quickly in winter. I don’t think the kinds of rovers depicted in The Postman, large groups of armed horsemen surviving off tributes from different small settlements of survivors, could survive as a group for very long based on the modus operandi in the movie. Unless a community had enough food stored ahead of time, they wouldn’t have the means to provide themselves with food from gardens and farm animals, let alone pay a large part of their production as tribute to armies of rovers. It takes more garden space than people realize to provide enough calories for just one person, let alone a community. Pasture space for enough animals would be next to impossible if the community is stockaded, and if not stockaded, pasture animals would be easily rustled by hungry rovers.
Based on these premises of the unprepared dying off early, the hordes running out of resources before too long, and the well-prepared and armed preppers taking out their share of rovers, I can’t picture the survival phase lasting very long in most areas.
Sometime during the survival stage, scouts will make a few quick trips to see if any of the closest neighbors survived. If we’re lucky we’ll have a ham radio and have been following the whole situation since it began, and getting some news to see how things are winding down in other areas. When we finally decide it’s safe, and the vast majority of the rovers are dead, we’ll move to the long-term New Normal stage.
STAGE 3: THE NEW NORMAL
Other than thinking about what barter items to stock up on, we only rarely see discussions of all the other aspects of the New Normal. Many of us haven’t thought far enough ahead, past the emergency and survival phases, as to what we want our life to look like once we get to the New Normal phase. As such, some of us aren’t adequately preparing for it. For too many, the prepping mentality is strictly about survival, not what the next step will be after the storm has passed and the sun is once again shining brightly. For me, we should tweak this survival-only thinking and look as far ahead as possible and plan for it. Hence the next article in this two-part series.
CONCLUSION
TEOTWAWKI won’t be one long, difficult, never-ending emergency. As this article points out, I’m betting the New Normal will arrive more quickly than most of us are planning on.
TEOTWAWKI will be a long-term whole new world, not a month-long camping trip. We’ll need supplies and equipment to provide a lifestyle that most closely resembles the conveniences of the one we have right now. We’ll want some types of equipment we don’t currently own, and we’ll want all of our equipment and supplies to be durable enough to provide those conveniences for as long as possible. Before Walmart becomes a distant memory, we’ll need to upgrade some of the items we currently have in our preps to something better, more durable. Some of these upgrades are relatively inexpensive, but others won’t come cheap. Many of these prep items which need upgrading are some of our everyday-use things. Upgrading to a higher-quality version can not only improve our lives today, but make us better prepared for whatever maybe ahead. This can be anything from a good set of kitchen knives to a complete set of wrenches to a portable power station.
We can’t realistically expect to enter a whole new world with things like a camp toilet, candles, a single-burner rocket stove, and manual tools for cutting firewood, when all of these can be easily replaced with sturdier or more technologically-advanced upgrades. We shouldn’t have to wear worn-out clothes, smell bad and have poor hygiene, try to get clothes clean without soap, risk death from a staph infection, or suffer the unimaginable horror of cooking food without spices just because we failed to stock up on all these simple items which we’ll be using at some future point anyway whether the Schumer ever hits the Fan, or not.
We should be planning for the New Normal stage, not the relatively short-term emergency and survival stages.
These are all my opinions, of course. I must be drinking the wrong kind of tea because reading the leaves hasn’t told me much. Like everyone else, I can only guess what the future holds.
In my next article, “A Realistic Top-10 Prepping List,” my basic premise is that we shouldn’t be preparing for just a long-term survival event. We should be preparing for a week to ten-day short Emergency Phase, followed by a month’s-long Survival Mode, then by a long-term New Normal world once the dust has settled and the last of the rovers have moved on to the Ashes-to-Ashes stage.
Obviously, the preps necessary to provide for our most basic needs like water, food, and heat are essential to get us through all stages of TEOTWAWKI, but once those are in place, we shouldn’t be prepping with inferior items which are only good for short-term emergencies, but rather, we should be preparing with the best we can afford for the happily ever-after New Normal.
We should keep these things in mind as we’re putting our prepping programs together.
Read the full article here