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Originally Posted by TimW
The nostalgia for a simpler time might wear off rather quickly for most.  |
That's a very good point right there. One lady I read about a while back lived the pioneer lifestyle for one year and hated it to death. But she came into it with wide eyed enthusiasm because she expected the clouds and got a bunch of weeds. Some of that was lack of preparation, some was failure to plan, a little bit was due to her being naive about the real nature of such a life, and other things as well. Plus she failed the golden rule of doing something new like that. She failed to acclimate herself with the systems and practice them. Oddly enough, the first settlers to America suffered the same issues. Roanoke failed for much the same reason. So unless someone was practicing living that life well in advance, the nostalgia would quickly wear off as you've mentioned and the "better life" would quickly turn into a drudgery surrounded by lots and lots of hands on OJT, and in a survival situation OJT is about as useful as expecting to survive a bullet to the head. People who are preppers at least partially have the right idea because they practice living like this all year long, so in a disaster situation they're less OJT (you'll still be learning something new all the time in a post disaster survival scenario, despite all your practice) and more DTJ that they have to do. But much to their chagrin, even they'll only be prepared for, at best, 10% of what the actual disaster will bring. lol. Oddly, they'll be 10% ahead of 99% of the world.
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Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
In an acute crisis, people are likely to pull together. Lord of the Flies was not written in stone.
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Oh, I agree fully. The question though remains as to exactly how much, and who, given the general dependence on modern technology, and the failure to learn and understand more basic survival methods. Of course, that all goes back to the mental state of Normalacy that exists in so much of the world today.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
We have plenty of examples of large-scale natural disasters to draw on. Many people pull together. Some are loners because they don't have the social skills to work with others. Some are predators. Mostly, though, people establish communities and rules quickly--but no amount of incredible social coordination will fix the fact that there are millions of people living in an area with food for thousands.
A lot of people would die of starvation. More would die of poison, disease or injury trying to obtain food or water, or consuming whatever they find even though it's spoiled. Following that, more would die of disease because none of our large cities has ways to cope with thousands of dead bodies and no mass transit.
It doesn't matter whether the apocalypse is a meteor, tidal waves, volcanoes, nuclear war, zombies, or alien invasion; if it destroys easy travel by car and the majority of the infrastructure required to get electricity to the public, the result is going to be mass death very quickly.
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DING! Spot on and well said! That's primarily why you only see about a 1 in 100 survival rate in most major EOTWAWKI disaster stories. In one story I've worked on, Stage 0 started out with an entire battalion of soldiers (it was a military focused end of the world novel) and by Stage 3 you had one squad left. In fact, if you watch Battle Los Angeles (it's a great movie that I highly recommend) they start out with an entire platoon and end up with 5 people by the end of the movie. Sure, it's all due to war and other extenuating circumstances, but even if you're dealing with a traditional disaster (volcano, asteroid, nutjob with a nuke, etc) you're still going to have massive attrition of people. It can't be avoided. However, lots of luck and some careful planning might minimize the losses.
Oddly though, I think the loss of life will be greater in developed countries than less developed due to reasons one person already iterated, which is that we'll have further to fall than they will. For example, most of NYC will either starve to death, or die from other causes, yet the Amish communities just a hundred miles away will see almost zero attrition. Well, at least until you start seeing hundreds of starving former NY'ers showing up on their doorsteps. >.<
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Originally Posted by Penforhire
Agreed. I consider myself well prepared but my stored water supply would only last me a month or so. I am only fully prepared for disasters of that duration without Federal assistance. And that further assumes my neighbors don't pillage my supplies.
The loss of running water would be the most immediate and pressing need in most major disasters. There is a reason almost all early communities were near bodies of water.
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Agreed. And most of those issues could be readily and easily mitigated with some simple over the counter solutions, and a wee bit of pre-planning. I mean, heck, $20 for a Brita water filter, a few spare inserts, a couple buckets and a tarp and you've got all the water you need. Well, assuming it rains regularly. But anyhow, yeah, I'm no prepper, but come on, even I could figure out something like that. Of course, I've been doing a lot of disaster survival related research for my latest couple of novels, so I'd have a bit of an edge over some others in my community because of that. Even so, $50 and a few hours of your time, if done in advance, you could have all the water you needed in a disaster.
