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Hippiekinkster -> RE: It's the End of the World as We Know It... (3/28/2011 10:15:29 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: StrangerThan
I lived with grandparents most of my childhood who had never emerged from the lessons of the Great Depression. Much of what might be considered survival strategies were second nature. We grew most of our food, plant and animal, and up until I was maybe 10, did our own butchering. Stretching crops through a good part of the winter was second nature as well. Some we canned, some we dug up, then put right back in the ground, some were dried, meat was salted and/or smoked. Hell, I plowed with mules up to about 14.
If you are one of the few survivors, you'll have a massive pool of resources. There's no reason you can't just survive, but do relatively well. Where you're going to hurt is with medical supplies. No matter how much you scavenge, once they start losing potency, you're screwed. My grandmother can still tell you which weeds, trees, shrubs, and the like to use for what malady, but truth is before antibiotics, many diseases were killers and maimers. The won't go away.
Crops I can grow. Animals I can raise and butcher. Fuel and electricity I can make. Other than a few plants that have mild medical applications though, I'd not have a clue. My wife is a nurse, but that doesn't mean she knows how to make drugs. So when it comes to scavenging, the people would probably be as important as the raw resources. Anyone who had worked with electricity, a doctor, anyone who either lived on a farm or had lived a farm life before, and like you, I would most likely reject a power structure where one person ran things. Pretty much, if I'm going to waste my time keeping someone else's ass alive, they better be out in the field with me.
Good post. One of my "odd" skillsets is being able to read stuff, then figure out how to do it. That, combined with my background in chemistry (mostly analytical, but I've synthesized some stuff), would best be used doing stuff other than building or plowing. I'm too frakkin' old for manual labour anyway. I also have access to a high-morphine strain of poppyseeds. Easy enough to extract M and codeine from poppystraw, and oxycodone is only a two-step synthesis from thebaine. Antibiotics would be harder, but penicillin was first isolated from a mold. I'd either have to learn microbiology or find someone with those skills, who can grow and isolate the correct mold. BTW, many drugs can last way past their shelf life. I found the following quite interesting. http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2009/2009-03-27-max_st_local_med_cntr.html Note how much money is saved with this program, which protects Americans. Probably one of the programs that far-rightards want to cut. Dumbfucks.
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