Parallel Society Coming ?

[Ninurta]

There are people who are seriously stacking gold and silver as those things are believed to be useful in such situations. If you had enough you may be able to be your own bank or at least not have to sell yourself for a bite of bread. 

Yup, there are people doing that, but I'm not one of them. Most of the "gold" and "silver" you can buy is not even real. You only buy an interest  in it. It's in an account somewhere, subject to manipulation - you don't actually get it in your hand, or even SEE it, and for all you know it's just a bunch of ones and zeros sitting on a computer somewhere across the internet, and therefore subject to the same manipulations and withholding as paper cash. Even the few places that will deliver you actual physical gold jingling in your hand are subject to manipulation, as speculators manipulate the commodities prices of gold.

Furthermore, neither gold nor silver have any value to me, and the value of a thing, anything at all, is only the value people assign to it. I can't eat gold, I can't hammer a nail with it, it won't keep me warm on a cold winter night, and I cannot kill a deer with it... so it has no value to me at all. Anyone thinking they can barter me out of my tangibles with something as intangible as gold is in for a rude awakening in the event of a collapse or sea change. I'm not giving up stuff I value for something I don't value.

Additionally, physical gold is a security risk. If other folks, folks who for some odd reason value shiny baubles like a crow does, get wind that you have a hoard of gold, life can suddenly get very interesting, and probably very short.

This situation is why I’m trying to learn how to do my own stuff including  gardening, making wine and studying herbal remedies. 

I do wonder if they’d leave a parallel society alone though as they seem to want power over everything.

My Dear Old Dad tried to prep me for such a situation when I was just a wee slip of a lad, all the way up until I left home. He was convinced it was coming, but his timetable appears to have been a bit off. He taught me how to garden with a horse instead of a tractor, how to haul timber out of the woods with a horse. how to garden, how to hunt, how to blacksmith, how to doctor myself, what wild things I could eat and which ones would kill me - just a whole bunch of seemingly useless things that he figured was going to become useful again. He stressed that I needed to learn how to do everything I could for myself, as he allowed that the day was coming back around again that I either wouldn't be able to find anyone to do it for me, or else there wouldn't be any money available to buy their services with if I could find them. Part of that, I suspect, is down to his having been born at the outset of the Great Depression, in a backwoods place where there never had been much money to begin with even before the financial collapse that ensued. He was a survivor, and tried to make one out of me as well.

Pap would even count my shells when I went hunting, and when I came back there had better be a piece of game for every missing shell - shells were expensive and hard to come by when he was growing up, just as they are getting to be again. that's why I've taken to rolling my own black powder cartridges out of home made powder and bullets, and making my own caps/primers.

As an aside, I'm diligently looking for some peppermint to make menthol from since the US government has banned menthol cigarettes and vape juice here. There's gonna be a black market there, and I intend to get in on the ground floor of it. I vape menthol, so if nothing else, I'll be able to use it myself even if I can't trade it for pork bellies. Same for the tobacco I'm intending to grow - I can get the nicotine out of it for vape juice, or trade it for something else I might need.

No, they will not leave a parallel society alone. They can't because, as I mentioned above, it saps their power away from them and gives it back to the People who rightfully own it. They will not allow that if they can stop it. That's why it has to be hardened, and made as establishment-proof as is humanly possible.


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