Survival 101

Survival 101. I was talking to my wife and getting pretty cynical at how little help people were getting with their subprime loans from the Government. I said, "This thing is so badly handled that it will drag down the world economy for another 5 years!" She looked at me and said, "Imagine what would have happened if the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and 9-11 hadn't happened." At first I looked at her and then realized that if we had continued in an economic "Golden Age" like the 1990's that the subprime effect would be 10 times as bad on the world economy than it presently is. Every thing is relative and because of that we likely would be in a depression right now if all our attention was focused on subprime problems rather than spread out over a variety of world and national problems. As we drove home I realized it might be useful to share how I survived various catastrophes in my own life.

I'm going to start with 1980-81 because that time is probably most similar to what is happening right now in the US. The US was dealing with Stagflation that had turned into a recession. Because I was still young (32 or so) I did not understand that the world had a vested interest in the United States economy not collapsing. So I thought the US was going to collapse economically because that is what it looked like then. (Especially out in the country) because in the country things tend to get worse there first. Those in the country and those in poor city neighborhoods are most likely to suffer the most, the first and the last, from a bad recession like that one.

At that time I had completed a building contract and there didn't appear to be any more in sight. I had just remarried within the year and so the two of us were raising her two kids (a boy and a girl) from her first marriage and my son from my first marriage. So we had five mouths to feed so we were worried at the bleak job outlook. My wife had a part time job and the money was dwindling fast. Eventually, since my new wife refused to move to where I might have a chance of a good job we were down to $5 to $10 dollars a week for food.(This means powdered milk, potatoes, rice and beans and whatever we were growing in our organic garden outside in our large back yard in the country in the mountains of Mt. Shasta, Ca.

Many people I knew in the country were beginning to panic from the recession and were buying guns(rifles) to hunt for deer to feed their families and buying bulk foods and burying them in 50 gallon drums underground so no one would steal their food. I knew this was just an extreme country type effect and that more rational people would be in the suburbs around big cities but I couldn't get my wife to move to where I could get a good job to support us. Also, at 30 I knew leaving my new wife and kids in this recession to go work somewhere else wasn't exactly safe and also one doesn't keep a new young wife if they are gone too much of the time. 5 to 10 years from now it might be a different story but now staying together for the family's sake had to be the primary priority. We finally survived the problem by buying land and building our own house on the 2 1/2 acres. We were able to buy land and sell one of our vehicles and with that money buy enough material to build a modest A-Frame that would shed the 7 feet or more snow that could fall at one time in the winter at the 4000 foot elevation where our new property was. We found we could grow an organic garden in the summer time and do just fine there about 8 months a year.(Longer if we didn't mind being snowed in for a month or longer without leaving.) There is a saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention." This was completely true in this case. When times get difficult one must be very open minded in creating a solution to protect oneself and ones family. Looking back there might have been many other solutions but none as elegant as the dream country life we shared 10 miles from the nearest small town.

However, during the early 80's that we spent 6 months or more a year there we home schooled our kids(because the school buses didn't go out that far) and because we thought it to be a way to keep our kids from becoming anti-adult like public school children tend to be. We made contracts with all 3 children that they had to complete a certain amount of work or they would have to go back to school. My son, the youngest, was 6 to 10 years old during this time and it worked fine until the oldest, my stepson was 12 and said, "I want to go to school again." At that point we decided to move back to the Northern California Coast and buy another business and we then put all three kids back in a very good school system.

The other serious crisis we encountered had to do with the changing US economy of the late 1980s. We found our alternative ecological points of view were not working as well as they had in a less mercenary economy. for example in the late 1960s and early 1970s there were so many social programs to "catch" people and to help their lives to work. By the early 1980s all this was ending for most people. By the economic crises my family faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s there wasn't ANY way other than relatives to survive as a family what we were facing.

This was something that I noticed that was completely different than the 1960s and 1970s. I watched people survive all sorts of problems in the 1960s and 1970s and then I watched their children and grandchildren basically die or go crazy in the new world we now live in because if you had 10 chances to survive and succeed in the 1960s and 1970s you had 1 chance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the 2000s unless you know someone you basically have no chance of upward mobility as of now in the United States. That is one of the saddest facts of life now in America. I wish it weren't so.

And it only appears to be getting worse. Of course, I'm already financially relatively secure so I am not out there struggling anymore so I can only tell you what my children and younger people tell me.