Listening to Katrina

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | Guns |

With Hurricane Ike recently in the news, now’s a good a time as any to revisit lessons from Hurricane Katrina that go beyond the usual, from someone who’s been there:

Past that point, though, we have to ask the simple question, “What is the strategy of a lifeboat? What is its purpose?” If you got into a lifeboat with a bunch of people who told you, “Don’t worry! We are professionals! We have been preparing for shipwrecks all our lives! We know exactly what to do!”, what would you want to know?

The first thing I would want to know is, “So…what’s the plan?”

Sit with me a moment in this lifeboat. There are a number of people here. Smart people. People with skills. People with forethought. Men and women of a Serious Nature. We ask our simple question, “So…what’s the plan?”, and they respond without skipping a beat. “We’re going to SURVIVE! We’ve got lots of SUPPLIES, and we can FISH and HUNT, and we know all the right things to do to LIVE in this LIFEBOAT! We KNOW how to distill SEA WATER, and we can DRINK our own URINE until the still is up and RUNNING!”

“Uh… So the plan is to stay in the lifeboat?”

“Yes! We have everything we need! We can live in the lifeboat indefinitely! We are self-sufficient! We can live in the lifeboat for years! We don’t need anything or anyone else. We have everything we need right here.”

“What about either trying to get rescued or making our way to dry land?”

All you get in response to that, though, is…the Freak look…

I want you to think about that. I want you to seriously appreciate the sheer madness of that. That is, though, what a lot of the books preach. Some kind of idyllic self-sufficiency. We seriously need to rethink that strategy…

While I enjoy a nice warm glass of urine as much as the next guy, I really want to be in a different lifeboat. I don’t know about you, but I want to be in a lifeboat that is seaworthy, yes, but light and fast. I want to get back to dry land, cold beer, juicy steak, warm blankets, and hot pie as soon as possible. Drifting the open ocean with a bunch of people - no matter how skilled or prepared they are - is not my idea of life.

I don’t want to be a sustenance farmer. I don’t want to live in a cave. I want my MTV! Why don’t any of the books, magazines, or doomsday websites ever cover that all important goal? Why hasn’t anyone written a book about what you need to do in order to create a society, to organize a town, and to build a city after TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It)? Because it isn’t sexy. It doesn’t feed our American Fantasy of Apocalypse. Guns, ammo, food storage, and wilderness survival skills are real things that people can cling to to assuage their fears. Is that stuff important? Yes. I’ve got all that stuff too. Is it the most important thing? Not by a longshot.

Reading gun-oriented message boards I see lots of posts by people who think of SHTF survival mostly in terms of strapping on a backpack and heading to the hills with lots of ammo. That always struck me as fantasy land daydreaming. This guy’s approach is much more oriented towards getting back to civilization and restarting your life. I like it. Living well inland I don’t know that I’d do all of this stuff, but I’d like to have copies of some important records in my safe deposit box.

1 Comment to Listening to Katrina

Mikee
October 13, 2008

Larry Niven used your premise for his book, LUCIFER”S HAMMER, about rebuilding civilization after a large meteorite strike. Those with electricity, how-to books, and guns won over those with just guns.