SURVIVE WHAT?
By P.J. Beaumont
Note: The author is an FCC-licensed Radio Technician, and volunteers with disaster response organizations. You can read more about his background here.
Last Thanksgiving, another guest at my in-laws’ table mentioned that she was looking into survivalism for the first time. She was nearing retirement age, educated with a decent job, who had lived a relatively safe life in a semi-rural area of the United States. She had read about all the unrest going on in the world, and wanted to try to figure out what she could do to survive if there were some sort of major calamity.
I’ve been thinking along those lines for a number of years now (a perusal of this blog should prove that), and wondering how any major social upheaval might play out. I look at the trouble in Haiti, which, as I write this, is ruled by lawless gangs and there are tales of cannibalism. I look at Ukraine, mired in a war that seems endless. I look at how China is doing a serious press on all fronts, from psychological to economic to technological, trying to weaken the United States and the West. Are DEI, the trans-sexual movement, and abortion-worship all efforts of China or other ideological enemies efforts to divide Americans and reduce our ability to reproduce? Even if they weren’t originally (though there’s a good chance they were), you can bet that they are being seized on and promoted for that purpose.
Why else is TikTok promoting educational videos on science and mathematics to Chinese children, but for Western children they are promoting transexualism and protest? Look at the studies of the feeds, and kids spend hours a day on the TikTok app.
It is said that civilization is seven missed meals from collapse, and that’s probably right. But think about it— even in the worst disasters that befall U.S. citizens, while people may get drowned in floods or storm surges or sucked up by tornadoes or buried by collapsed buildings or lava floes, I don’t recall hearing of anyone who has out-and-out starved to death, except by being trapped.
Over 20 years ago Hurricane Floyd swept over the Washington, DC area, and it knocked out power to a wide area of the northern suburbs, where I lived at the time. Being an all-electric house, we couldn’t cook meals or do anything else that required electricity from the mains. The power stayed off for several days. But there were no large-scale riots, no looting, no roving gangs of marauders raping and pillaging.
Why? Probably due to the “seven missed meals” rule. We could still get in our car and travel to places where the electricity was still on, to get gas and groceries and even eat at a restaurant, which we did. The elderly and infirm were looked after by their relatives and neighbors, and I don’t recall hearing of anyone out-and-out starving.
But what would you do if you missed breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two full days, and breakfast on the third? And your children were starving? And it didn’t look like help was coming any time soon?
Hungry people do desperate things.
How well do you know your neighbors? How many of them think like you, or even know you at all? Have you seen some of the statements from radical DEI proponents, about how all White people should be killed and removed from the earth? And the statements from the reactionaries who feel the same way in the opposite direction?
During the War Between the States, at the time neither side wanted to slaughter the entirety of the other side. The South wanted to be left alone to practice slavery, and the North didn’t want to allow secession. Slavery was the Great Moral Issue of the time. The people of the North didn’t want to kill anyone who believed in slavery as long as they didn’t practice it.
These days it’s different. Liberals have been taught to hate on command. Trump voters feel that liberals are a cancer on the world, and are responsible for the mess the Western societies are in right now. Unlike the coming together that was promoted heavily by the survivors of the United States Civil War, there are many on both sides who would relish the chance to totally eliminate the other. The divides along political lines are extreme, and have gone beyond what many would consider simple tribalism.
SURVIVAL REALITIES
Stocking up on freeze-dried rations and water purification equipment won’t do you any good if a band of heavily-armed attackers decides to take what you’ve got. The South African farmers are learning that the hard way, as gangs of terrorists are roaming the farming regions and attacking farms and farmers. A generation ago, the same thing was done in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and when the people who knew how to work the land were forced off it or killed, nobody was left who knew how to grow food. Mass starvation resulted. Like the similar-minded zealots in Zimbabwe, apparently the South African gang members aren’t intelligent enough to understand where their food comes from.
Let’s talk about farms, and growing your own food. Just learning what will grow in your garden and how to tend it can take a couple of growing seasons. For those two years, you won’t harvest much food, if any. And do you know how much land— good, arable land— it will take to feed your family? Figure on at least two acres per person.
While they are growing, those crops will be exposed to the elements. Some of the elements, like rain and sun, will help your crop grow. Others, like high wind, insects, and diseases, can harm them. Drought is still another worry. The United States is a fairly large country, big enough that most disasters can be considered more or less local in scope (the Dust Bowl possibly being an exception). We have a massive infrastructure of roadways and rail lines, and huge numbers of trucks and locomotives and rail cars to ply them, and together with ships and barge traffic we are able to get massive amounts of food anywhere it’s needed. So far, anyway.
Our water system is amazing, delivering safe-to-drink water to hundreds of millions of people. If my wife wants to water her garden, she merely pulls out a hose and opens a spigot. The cost is a few cents.
In a survival situation, the major problems will come from other humans. If a major natural calamity strikes, will we come together and re-build our economy, getting more for ourselves by providing more in trade to others? Or end up like Haiti?
And then there are the purely man-made calamities, like invasion or civil war. Twenty atomic bombs set off in strategic locations 100 miles above the U.S. would fry EVERY transistorized device (a few pieces of military equipment are hardened against it), and there are damn few devices these days which aren’t transistorized. Your car would not work– in fact, nearly every vehicle would get bricked– the fuel distribution system would not work, the electrical system would not work. Food could not get distributed, or baked, or canned. After the stores are emptied, they won’t be filled again.
People don’t realize how massive, intricate, incredibly complicated, and downright fragile our system of civilization is. Do you know what it takes to run a railroad system, or even just a locomotive? Do you know how to pilot a raft of barges down a river? Do you even know what a grain elevator is?
Let’s talk about grain elevators. They are basically massive silos that store the grain from several farms in central locations where rail cars or ships can be filled and the grain taken to where it can be made into flour, and then into baked products. I’ve been given a tour of some medium-sized grain silos in Canada, a cluster of twelve of them that are about 120 feet tall and 40 feet across. All the produce from your backyard farm would maybe fill one inch in one silo, and probably not even that.
These silos, and hundreds of thousands like them all across the North American continent, provide just a portion of the food we consume. They are filled and emptied several times each year, as the grain is loaded onto trains or ships and replaced by more coming in from local farms. The grain contained in one train or ship will feed thousands of people for months.
Inner city kids like to sit on bridges over railroad tracks, and throw rocks at the trains. But most children are ignorant, and have no idea where their food comes from. Judging by the videos I see of college students answering (actually, failing to answer) simple history and science questions, many of the adults are pretty ignorant, too.
The rural, food-growing areas of the U.S. aren’t all that scared of social upheaval. The urban gangbangers don’t even know where the “country” is. The farmers will just bring in their massive tractors and block or tear up the highways and train tracks coming from the cities. The gang bangers will eat the millennial Yuppies that can’t escape. I’ve heard there is a guy named “Barbecue” in Haiti who could give them some recipes.
I’ve read articles claiming that the legal gun owners in the United States outnumber all the active members of all the armies on the earth. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it sounds about right. Joe Biden says that an AR-15 won’t do much good against an F-22 or an artillery barrage, but I know a few Vietnamese and Taliban who would be able to make an argument against that statement. Those people used crappy AK-47s that couldn’t hit a barn door at 100 feet, and what happened? I’m sure everyone’s seen the pictures of the helicopters evacuating people off of rooftops when the people armed with those AK-47s came in to take over.
Will the U.S. Military even help in such a situation? The government is expelling native-born patriotic Americans from the U.S. Armed Forces as fast as they can, and enlisting as many recent immigrants as possible— including the illegal ones. If I was a cynic, I’d say they were trying to build a military that would have no qualms about massacring Americans. But gee, that can’t be what they are doing, could it? Naw, impossible!
So what should you do? Find a place where people think like you, move there and build friendships. Learn how to fix things, how to run things, how to make things, and how to grow food.
And learn how to operate a firearm.