There have been people who didn’t. Enoch was Noah’s grandfather, God found him too pleasing, so He just took him up, without his dying. Elijah was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, without dying.
So it is not absolutely 100.00% certain that you’re going to die. The angel Gabriel told Mary, mother of Jesus, about the pregnancy of John the Baptist by Mary’s elderly cousin Elisabeth, wife of Zachariah, saying that no word is impossible to God, in other words, that nothing is impossible to God.
Now rather than get right back to harsh reality from such foolish talk, let’s work up through a kind of oddsmaking excercise, asking if your parents died, and so, how likely is it that you will too? Maybe one or both are still alive. Then, go up a generation, to your four grandparents, or to your eight great-grandparents. Certainly by your sixteen great-great-grandparents, they virtually all died. And that’s a kind of genetic inheritence, that makes it rather quite likely that you will too.
What’s the point of all this ridiculousness? It’s to diffuse the morbid fear of death. I’ll tell a story in the first comment about an acquaintance of mine who actually has a serious, morbid fear of death. What it involves is that certain subjects, like funerals, morgues and even hospitals, cause paralyzing fear in certain people.
But that is a direct result of simple unfamiliarity. People who are approaching their life end, have a lot of time as they slow down, then start getting sick, to think about death a lot. So it becomes less and less frightful.
What’s all this getting at? It’s by way of diffusing the fact, that because of our war, and the fact that we’re undergoing a fall quite parallel to what Britain experienced after World War II, it is a virtual certainty that there will be food shortages.
It’s all in the Wall Street Journal.
That evokes INSTANT TERROR, equivalent to all these ideas of fear of death that I’ve been feinting toward, faking at.
The similarity with gradually accepting that death is going to come, is that, with a little time to think it out, the paralysis of terror of no food, can be overcome.
Then you can plan.
And, actually, AVOID the worst happening to you.
Because you have a lot of freedom of action, if you will just THINK!
There is still food in the stores, even if it’s getting quite expensive. Those with big belts, will have to tighen up to buy it; those with lean belts may have to default on loans, or worse. But nothing’s more important than eating, than drinking water and breathing. So eating is basically, Mandatory.
So if the fear is starting to recede now, then, things get much brighter, if only gradually.
What if…
What if we could actually PLAN for severe food shortages, including empty store shelves. What would be our rational course of action.
We wouldn’t have to go to extremes like Burt Gummer in Tremors (A**blasters), stocking up fantatically on Meals Ready to Eat that last 20 years, as though there would be 20 years if we got into a civil war.
More scary talk. Just kidding.
What would you do if you could actually, think about what you’d do, without having to run off to the bathroom right away as soon as the thought “Meal Plan” crossed your mind.
What would it consist of? You’d chart out an expected lenght of time when there wouldn’t be any diesel to deliver the food to stores. So, how long would you guess. (Please comment, how long?)
For me, I’m guessing 90 days, but for a margin of safety, I’m going for 105 days of severe food shortages.
“The Sky is Falling!”, said Chicken Little.
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” said President Roosevelt, when radio allowed his voice to enter nearly every home, and you could be encouraged by his confident tone.
But, BUT … how would you actually DO a food plan?
Ready dot gov has a reasonable model, for those still so terrified of the thought that they just can’t think.
For those who have gulped down the bullet and decided to calm down, take off the training wheels and think a bit, in essence a food plan consists in stocking up on staples that, while they might be disgusting after a while, will keep you alive. That’s a remote stretch, unless you’ve been through a natural disaster and have some experience with what works and what Definitely doesn’t.
A “nearer” approach, one with the virtue of familiarity, is starting out with making a list of what you already eat, bridging over to the staples and the available supplies, then going between (interpolating) to structure your food plan on familiar food that has to be stretched or bridged over to disaster food supplies.
So, I got potato flakes and giant cans of dried onions at a Latter Day Saints (LDS) Bishop’s Storehouse. (Just use those terms.) They have dried carrots, giant cans of dried beans that aren’t fundamentally different than bulk beans from the self-serve bins especially at markets that serve Latinos.
If you will just face up to facts, you might be very glad that you didn’t let FRIGHT cause you the considerable, beyond embarrassment, the desperation of running out, for yourself, and, far worse, of seeing your family go hungry and possibly get quite sick, or worse.
Buck Up, Bucko.
Charles Oconnell, Dissident News
