Found this quote in a book that could have been written in 2002. Hope P&L (posters and lurkers) get a kick out of it, as I did.

"It is not so easy to think oneself back to their outlook of those days. We have to be more self sufficient now. But then there was so much routine, things were so interlinked. Each one of us so steadily did his little part in the right place that it was easy to mistake habit and custom for natural law - and all the more disturbing, therefore, when the routine was in any way upset.

When almost a half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five minute business. Looking back at the shape of things then, the amount we did not know, nor care to know about our daily lives is not only astonishing but somehow a bit shocking. I knew practically nothing, for instance, of such ordinary things as how my food reached me, where fresh water came from, how the clothes I wore were woven and made, how the drainage of cities kept them healthy. Our lives had become a complexity of specialists, all attending to their jobs with more or less efficiency and expecting others to do the same.

Many of us here are feeling numbed by this catastrophe. The world as we knew it has ended in a flash. Some of us may be feeling that it is the end of everything. It is not. But I say to all of you that it can be the end of everything - if we let it.

Stupendous as this disaster is, there is, however, a margin of survival. It may be worth remembering just how we are not unique in looking upon vast calamity. What ever the myths have grown up around it, there can be no doubt that somewhere far back in our history there was a great flood. Those who survived must have looked at a disaster comparable to this one. But they cannot have dispaired; they must have begun again - as we can begin again.

And to further deflate any romantic dramatization, I would like to point out to you that this, even now, is not the worst that could have happened. I, and quite likely many of you, have spent most of my life in expectation of something worse. And I still believe that if this had not happened to us, that worse thing would.

Sooner or later that slip would have been made. It would not have mattered whether it came through malice, carelessness, or sheer accident; the balance would have been lost and destruction let loose.

How bad would it have been, we cannot say. How bad it could have been - well, there might not have been any survivors; and possibly no planet.

And now contrast out situation. The earth is intact, unscarred, fruitful. It can provide us with food and raw materials. We have repositories of knowledge that can teach us anything that has been done before - though there are some things that are better unremembered. And we have the health, the means and the strength to begin to build again."

From "Day of the Triffids" By John Wyndham Copyright 1951

-- Michael (mgentry@prodigy.net), December 05, 1999

Answers

Is that your final answer?

-- dinosaur (dinosaur@williams-net.com), December 05, 1999.

just had a flashback to one of the 'Planet of the Apes' movies...where the apes are rebuilding an atomic device.......

-- Satanta (satanta@zdnetmail.com), December 05, 1999.

I've been reading, Dangerous Thoughts, by Yuri Orlov, ISBN 0-688-10471- 1 and finding myself comparing Y2K (The 30 month window) to his own experiences and eye witness accounts. He was a young boy at the time of the peasant farm collectivism so he has seen it all. He does a wonderful job of providing details instead blandly stating, "We were hungry and poor." He witnessed whole extended families huddling in one room, 2-3 to a single bed, the dew dripping down the walls, bread rationing, women moonlighting at night as prostitutes, beggars wearing hemp sandals, people falling out of the rationing loop hole, ecetera. And a government spinning, spinning, spinning, for every starving person was an article about how wonderful and successful the farm collectivism was going.

-- Paula (chowbabe@pacbell.net), December 05, 1999.

Thank you, Michael. I found this address quite inspirational. When his daughter lost her leg in a traffic accident, Robert Schuller told "Don't look at what you have lost, but at what you have left." That's wise advise for any situation where one faces loss--whether of a job, a possession, a belief, even a cherished relationship. It may serve us well to remember this counsel in the days so soon upon us.

-- Faith Weaver (suzsolutions@yahoo.com), December 05, 1999.

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That's nice.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 05, 1999.

Now this thread is PREPARATION.

Get you beans and rice, sure.

But, prepare you HEAD. And you HEART.

That's where survival starts and ends.

-- Greybear (greybear@home.com), December 05, 1999.

Most people remember the 1950's as a time of prosparity. I remember them as a time of absolute hunger. Do you know what it's like to watch your parents crying when they think you're not looking because there's not enough food to feed just four people? Do you know what it's like to have nothing to eat but frogs, frogs, and more frogs? I was only six years old. My baby sister and I had to hunt those d*&%$# frogs every day so there would be something on the table for supper at night. I helped my mama and daddy hunt squirrel, rabbit and deer to keep us fed. Do you know how good your aim with a bow or a slingshot gets when you are really really hungry? I do. We bought navy beans by the barrel whenever there was enough money to do so. Did we live in some little backwoods holler? NO. We lived just outside a large mid- western city. My parents were on strike for 18 months trying to maintain their jobs at a factory that was threatening even then to move out of the country!!! If I could do what I did then as a tiny little girl, I'm sure as hell going to be able to feed my family now as a grown-up with many, many more skills and knowledge of life. Remember....if two little girls ages 4 and 6 can feed four people, then you grown-ups should be able to figure it out.

-- Deilia (BeenHungry@neveragain.com), December 06, 1999.