13 October 20XX
My Dear Lucilius:
Sad news – we have
had our first local death.
Young Xerxes stopped
by and gave me the news. An older couple, one I do not recall
meeting except perhaps at the July Fourth Celebration, who apparently
– simply – gave up. He was, apparently, a diabetic with limited
insulin. Not many other details from young Xerxes except that they
simply “Gave up.” At their request, their things are to parceled
out to the community as needed.
There are the usual
issues, of course: the practical issue of burial (the ground here is
not precisely easy to turn at this time of year), how their
possessions are to be distributed (someone suggested creating a depot
of sorts at the building that has become a sort of community center),
and of course the lingering thought on the back of everyone’s mind
(and now undoubtedly at the forefront): the reality of death.
I wonder, Lucilius,
even in the short period since the official “Holiday”, how many
have died. For me, it seems an abstract thought in a way: I am
hundreds of miles from a major metropolis, but surely some have. How
many? Scores? Hundreds? Thousands? Unless things rapidly return
to normal – and how unlikely that seems today – it will be
millions.
But even in that,
there are two issues. On the one hand, there are those who will die
from privation and lack of food, of shelter, of warmth, of medical
care – of basic needs. The others – like those here – are
those that will die from lack of hope.
A lack of hope? It
seems like such an odd thing to die from, does it not? Yet for other
thousands – or perhaps millions – there has been a passing away
of the old order that is perhaps not likely to ever return. It is
one thing – even where we live – to live through a harsh week of
Winter or a power outage that lasts a few days. We have done that
before. But to look forward into the future and see…. Chaos.
Disruption. No sense of things ever returning to the way the were
before. That, my friend, is a gap that so many have never considered
at length.
The cynical side of
me asks if this has always been the case, or really just the last
10-15 years. Our national spending out of control, our deficits
beyond what we could repay in three lifetimes, the personal finances
of so many financed by debt, a society where the ability to live
without working was almost as profitable as working.
Perhaps, in that
sense, we were always staring at this abyss. It is just that the
view has finally been revealed.
Your Obedient
Servant, Seneca
Interesting chapter. In his Surviving Off Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind, Michael Bunker believes that many, many people would die during a collapse simply because they couldn't cope with the loss of lifestyle. I used to think that was far-fetched, but anymore I wonder if it isn't true. Losing hope would certainly be a contributing factor.
ReplyDeleteThank you Leigh. I think I agree with Mr. Bunker - it is not just that things become scarce, but that the shape of the world (as it were) has changed. Just think of the (relatively benign) tragedy of a cell phone network going down. Now imagine an entire generation realizing that there will never be cell phones or social networks again.
ReplyDeleteThe other category of people will be the people that just refuse to learn, even though they give up hope. Pat Frank's Alas Babylon speaks of those people - mostly living in a retirement home, trying to live exactly as they had lived before and not prepared to adapt to the new world. In that book, an accidental fire from a hot plate burns the home down. I suspect that many people would simply refuse to adapt, even if shown how.
Oddly enough, it is an area not really touched by the few survival works I have read. I wonder if that is because of the nature of the book (after all, reading about people dying relatively early makes for a short book) or that subconsciously, authors steer away from the horror.