Something I think we have failed to address is our own personal feelings toward the idea of an actual apocalypse. I am not asking people to answer: if there is an apocalypse, what would you do? Instead I am prompting everyone to think about how we live our lives today, and if it all came crumbling down, would the average American truly be able to survive as the characters in the stories we are reading have? I was actually prompted by Michael's apocalyptic whoa about his vision and I understood completely where he was coming from.
Our lives today are held together by very fine threads: the communication technologies we depend upon are dependent on endless networks of other technologies, our vehicles, appliances, electronics can only be decoded and repaired by "experts" who specialize in things we will never understand nor care to understand, our food only reaches us after being trucked across miles of country and ocean. We accept this and we pay good money to accept this, but a thought that sometimes crops up in my mind every so often is that we do not have to accept this wholly dependent lifestyle if we don't want to.
In some crazy tangent I had, a passing fancy, I was going to grow my own garden, learn some basic mechanics, and fix and build things myself. I purchased a book, The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It. Looking back, it was silly to turn to an "expert" to learn self-sufficiency, but that is what I did. As if I was Lauren from The Parable of the Sower, I studied just how to plot out my summer and winter gardens, how to churn butter and weave baskets, how to create a rain purification system, the works. My boyfriend thought I was nuts.
I didn't think there was a pending apocalypse, but I got tired of feeling so dependent on a system whose institutions seem so faulty, so misleading, so unecessary. We live this way because we feel we have to, that we are too busy to become self-sufficient, because the standard of living has gotten better for us, so we don't have to know how to fix our own toilets. Have I been churning butter and weaving baskets of recent? No, I have yet to do any of the things I read about, but it still has sparked an urge in me to begin figuring things out for myself, because if there was an apocalypse, if the truck full of homogenized hormone milk failed to show up tomorrow, if we got a flat tire out in the middle of no where, would we be able to help ourselves?
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Wow. Megan, to be honest with you, I do not think I would come close to surviving an apocalypse. Just looking at the difference between my parens and I, I realize how relatively easy my life has been.
ReplyDeleteIn the recent twenty years, I find that more people have attended schools in order to attain more white collar jobs, and not blue collar jobs. As it is, I am not out working in the fields anywhere, but rather I work in an office on campus doing clerical work. Likewise, I am attending school, not to be a garbage man, but to one day work in a government office. What it comes down to, is that I find more people like myself, just don't want to do the "dirty job".
Do I know how to change a tire? No. Can I make a fire? No. Do I know how to tend a wound? No. Do I know how to send an email? Yes. Do I know how to design a web page? Yes. But where will these things get me, when it comes down to a catastrophe or even just a deteriation of the world as I know it? Nowhere.
The closest thing to an apocalypse was the two weeks following Katrina, when we had no air conditioning in our home. In our society, we have relied so heavily on technology, that I dont think many of us would survive an apocalypse.
As I look at Laura and the events that take place in the Parable of the Sower, I question the education that we recieve in college or throughout our childhood. To some degree, do you think that we should have classes that teach us basic survival skills? And if so, how many of us would actually take it?