(04-20-2021, 02:58 PM)ABNARTY Wrote: I live in a rural area. Lots of people already utilize some form of barter. Trades. Stuff gets sold and resold all the time. I think they will be OK.
Yup, they will. Rural folks are much better equipped to survive it than urban folks are. Cities started out as trading centers, then morphed into defensive cooperatives, then went back to trading centers before slowly sliding off into the shitholes they are today. Ever wonder why nearly every city has a river running through it? Because it started out as a trading center, and water was the best way to move goods to market before the superhighway era. Their biggest function today seems to be as financial centers, but they cannot survive without preying on the countryside outside of themselves, and they tend to collect the most helpless among us when it comes to simple survival - which is why the "guaranteed minimum income" is starting to take hold in them. Urban areas have neither the resources nor the know-how nor the will to actually support themselves without that predatory inclination.
Rural folks have the countryside to farm and hunt, many or possibly most still have the know-how to do so, and far fewer predators among them. And they still know how to cooperate to get things done. Everything the cities produce or consume started out as raw materials they had to somehow get from the countryside.
The biggest challenges to country folks will be re-learning some things they have forgotten over time, and preventing urban predators from raiding them out of existence. When the urban centers can no longer feed themselves, and rural production has dropped to the point that they can no longer feed the urbanites, well, folks do some hinky shit when they get hungry enough. Nearly everyone defaults back to their basic nature when they chips are down, The basic nature of country folks is cooperative within their own communities, looking out for their own, and the basic nature of urban folks is predatory, every man for himself. So, rural people will have to see to their own defense when the urban people come calling. The basics are that rural folks will have to hinder vehicular traffic out of the cities, and put the urban people on foot, then employ hindrances to foot travel. A hungry man won't walk much more than 3 days in general, and making that journey tougher is discouraging enough that most go looking for easier routes or easier prey. Some would still show up, but not nearly as many. the objective is to keep them from showing up in masses, like locusts. Single folks and small groups are easier to handle when they are in unfamiliar territory than armies are. Rural folks have a better chance of out-massing smaller groups by putting the call out through the countryside.
This is some seriously depressing, post-apocalyptic shit. A better course of action would be to prevent it, and that means getting the current crop of idiots out of office and putting a different crop of idiots in, preferably less Marxist in their idiocy. For dealing with non-office holding idiots, like BLM and Antifa, there is already a strong undercurrent of discontent arrayed against them, and it seems to be spreading and moving in the direction of an "underground" of sorts to combat their stupidity.
Cross your fingers and hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
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Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’