Will Beans, Bullets, and Band Aids Be the New Wealth?
Survival Diva here with a question. Do you believe there will come a time when wealth will be defined by what food storage, survival goods and skill-sets we possess? I believe it’s highly possible. Looking back throughout history, whenever a crisis hits, people’s immediate concerns turn to food, water, shelter and the skill-sets and experience critical for survival.
As we struggle, pinching nickels and dimes to get food storage and preparedness goods put aside, it reminds me of the parable “The meek shall inherit the earth”. The more we struggle, jumping first through one hurdle, then the next, and the next, it becomes second nature to do without many of the things we once took for granted.
In the end, the every-day struggles seen as hardships now may actually be blessings in disguise as we learn to adapt to having less. More than one person on the forum has mentioned they’ve suddenly become frugal. Items like empty plastic containers that once would have been tossed are now saved to be used for food storage when they’re needed. Cardboard and old newspapers are being squirreled away for fire building when not so long ago it was viewed as clutter and thrown away. Even old phone books and catalogs don’t necessarily find their way to the dumpster…not when they can be used for emergency for toilet paper. These things will be needed!
Likewise, clothing is now mended rather than being tossed, and children’s clothing and shoes that have been outgrown are saved for others who may need them. Recycling suddenly makes perfect sense, and because of this mindset, we’re becoming more resilient and adaptable to the changes many are warning of.
When you think about it, being economically challenged might be a proving ground for survival. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to have a peek into the life of someone who has led a privileged life who suddenly finds himself facing a crisis he is totally unprepared for.
Stuart, the Banker
Stuart, the branch manager of a too-big-to-fail bank springs into action the second the emergency broadcast interrupts radio and TV transmissions. Details of the emergency is sketchy, stating only for everyone to remain indoors and to stay tuned for further information, which only serves to panic the bank’s clientele and his employees.
Stuart prevents any more account holders from getting into the bank by locking the doors. As customers are rushed through their transactions, he escorts them to the doors as quickly as possible, seeing them out as he refuses to make eye contact with the angry line of people standing just outside. They were there for one of two reasons: to make withdrawals or to access their safety deposit boxes.
Once the last customer is escorted through the door, Stuart insists his employees leave through the back door to avoid the growing line of people who by now are shouting in anger and demanding to be let in. What Stuart doesn’t share, even with his employees, is that most of the depositors’ money isn’t physically in the bank anyway. No bank that pays interest has ever kept depositors’ money on hand–they loan most of it out–and had he opened the doors, the cash on hand would’ve run out in minutes and he would have faced an even bigger revolt. The $300 ATM limit set by the bank would see most through…until the machines ran out of cash.
On his drive home, the news that forced him to close the bank–indefinitely–still isn’t offering specifics on the state of the emergency, which only increases his worry. After half an hour of the same recording being played over and over, Stuart decides to call his friends who are usually “in the know”, hoping they’ll have inside information. With each attempt, his calls bring nothing but dead air—no dial tone, not even a busy signal.
He must contend with gridlock on his short drive home to his high-rise condo, but the gridlock turns crippling when the traffic lights suddenly stop working. His commute takes him a full 90 minutes opposed to the typical 20.
It isn’t long before Stuart realizes his battle is just beginning.
Pulling around to the underground parking garage, the frazzled banker discovers the heavy steel garage doors won’t open, which is the first concrete sign the problem with the street lights is bigger than he originally suspected. It appears the entire electrical grid is compromised.
For a fleeting moment, Stuart feels concern for his customers who weren’t going to be able to access cash from ATM machines, but his concern is soon diverted while he hunts for street parking in front of his condominium complex.
The elevator is out, forcing him to take the staircase to his tenth floor condo in the darkness of the unlit stairwell. He reaches his condo out of breath, but Stuart is relieved to see the waning daylight still offers enough light to maneuver the condo’s spacious interior.
Stuart settles himself on the couch to catch his breath, wondering how long it will take before looting breaks out. His condo is located in the heart of a heavily populated area known for its quaint coffee shops, grocers, restaurants, deli’s and every other convenience imaginable. Just next door is a popular shop that specializes in exotic cheese and wines, and next to them is a butcher shop that draws people to the area because of their reputation for having the choicest cuts of beef in the vicinity. Getting to all these delicacies won’t take more than a well-placed brick or a club, and once the looting starts, there will be no controlling it.
He didn’t have long to wait, but the first disturbance isn’t centered on food.
The blare of a car alarm reaches past the living room’s floor to ceiling window and Stuart gets up to peer down to street level to investigate. A group of men are busy helping themselves to the radio, tires, and whatever car parts they can dismantle and carry off from his Mercedes. The battery is the last item to go.
There isn’t a thing he can do to stop them; not without a weapon. His growing concern for his safety has him searching for his flashlight in the growing darkness. He locates it in his bedside table, but he might as well not have bothered. The batteries are dead.
Angry, he marches into the kitchen, grabs a glass from the cabinet, and turns on the faucet. The pipes refuse to deliver even a trickle of water. The implications have him racing to the refrigerator. The warming interior reveals a bottle of semi-chilled wine, leftover steak in a to-go container, two sticks of butter, a small jar of mayonnaise, a bottle of ketchup, and a carton of milk that’s nearly empty. What he hoped to find was bottled water. In the freezer are two containers of frozen orange concentrate and a freezer-burned package of tenderloins.
As he contemplated the ramifications of his nearly nightly dependence on neighborhood restaurants and his dislike of grocery shopping, he pours what is left in the milk cartoon into his glass and chugs it in a few gulps.
Standing at the kitchen counter, he chokes down panic. Already he is without running water, which probably means he won’t be able to flush the toilet; plus he is without transportation.
As far as survival goods are concerned, he can’t think of a single thing he owns that will be useful in a long term crisis. He never had an interest in camping or hunting and fishing. That will cost him should this emergency prove to be long term, Stuart thinks to himself.
To confirm the trouble he’s in, Stuart walks to the pantry which is situated next to the refrigerator. The contents are as pitiful as he fears. There is a partial bag of flour, one of corn meal, and another of white sugar. On the middle shelf is a few paltry cans of condensed soup, which will be difficult to choke down without water or milk to thin it down…and he just chugged the last of the milk.
He doesn’t have a generator, nor does he have a camp stove or a way to heat his condo, which is already growing chilly.
He doesn’t have to check the state of his medicine cabinet to know all it contains are band aides, Neosporin, Tylenol, and a thermometer.
Stuart is trapped. Now that his battery has been heisted from his Mercedes, he no longer has transportation or a radio to listen to upcoming broadcasts. He can’t even turn to his neighbors. He’d never made the time to get to know any of them. Should he show up now, when things are crumbling around them, they’d likely slam the door in his face.
Several months ago he’d run into an old college friend who’d bragged about investing in an underground shelter and proceeded tick off a laundry list of items he’d stocked piled it with. Another friend bought a getaway cabin when the EU began to crumble. At the time he’d viewed both of them as paranoid. He’d been an idiot then, and an even bigger idiot today. Before he had left the bank he hadn’t thought to grab the gold and silver bullion stored in his safety deposit box.
He returned to the floor to ceiling windows. Just as he feared, the sidewalks are crowded with people walking aimlessly about. Several have guns, and others carry clubs. From his birds-eye view ten stories above, he watches a fight break out a few blocks down. The neighborhood is teetering on the precipice of unruliness. All it will take is the smallest spark to tip the scales into a full-blown breakdown.
As Stuart continues investigating the street below, he knows he will never make it safely to the bank and back again to retrieve the gold and silver without transportation and a weapon. Resigned, he walks back to the kitchen for the bottle of semi-chilled wine and a corkscrew. Before he returns to the couch he takes the time to grab the comforter off his bed.
It isn’t until he’s been sitting on the couch for several minutes with the comforter thrown across his shoulders for warmth that he sees the candles resting in decorative sterling silver candlesticks. He will have light, if only for this first night.
From there, he doesn’t have a clue how he is going to survive.
* * *
Now let’s pit Stuart’s lifestyle against Randy and Melissa’s.
Randy & Milissa, Preppers
For Randy, the day became a blur of activity the minute a coworker burst from the break room to tell them about an Emergency Broadcast. Randy doesn’t waste time asking questions, nor does he stop to call his wife Melissa. Their emergency plan is for them to meet at their children’s school. If they can’t drive the route from their work places to the school, their back-up plan is for them to meet at a park that is the half-way point between their jobs, even if it means walking, and continue on to the school.
Because cell phone coverage is likely to be jammed or down at the start of an emergency, they agreed to use two-way radios. The coverage left a lot to be desired, but other than an EMP attack, they’ve determined in a full-blown emergency, two-way radios are superior for reliable communications.
As a family they’ve practiced emergency drills often enough their children view them as just another family outing. Randy’s priority is hitting the road before the inevitable gridlock begins. Any delay gives time for the roadways to become impassable and they will be forced to walk the 23 miles home.
Just before he leaves the parking lot, Randy grabs a small battery-run radio from the glove box of his SUV and turns the radio on. The broadcast he hears is less than helpful. It’s the same announcement reported by his co-worker; people are to remain indoors and stay tuned for further information. Randy tunes out the repeating news loop to concentrate on the road.
Melissa will already be on her way to the grade school to pick up their son and daughter, and that’s where he is headed as he snakes in and out of the frantic traffic. Beside him is his go-bag he grabbed from his work locker on his way out. In the back of the SUV are duplicates. There were few things about preparedness that Randy and Melissa disagree on, and redundancy certainly isn’t one of them. They back up all of their prep goods. In each bag is three days’ worth of survival goods, including medicine, a compass, a topographical map, two-way radios, and other essentials. Between Randy and Melissa, their go-bags also contain a first aid book, a book on wild edible plants, copies of important documents, a collapsible fishing pole, a volcano camp stove, Urban Survival Playing Cards, one-strike matches and sundry survival goods essential to survival should they need to disappear into the woods if the situation warrants it.
They each carry a hand gun and bullets, which they hope will never have to be used, but they are resigned to the fact that during a full-blown emergency, there are bound to be folks willing to do whatever it takes to survive; including violence. Because neither can bring a gun into their workplace, Randy and Melissa store tactical survival knives in the go-bags they store at work. Months of tactical training and constant practice in Target Focus Training’s empty hands combatives have them confident they will be able to protect themselves and their children if ever it becomes necessary.
As Randy weaves around stalled cars and deals with the increasingly heavy traffic, he contemplates the many years he and Melissa have lived frugally so they were able to get prepared. The first thing to go were dinners out and movie nights. Instead of taking vacation, they used the money and the time to stock the basement full of food storage and MRE’s.
It took over six months to set aside enough money to dig a well and get a frost-free hand pump. Only last month, they finally found the cash to slap up a shed to camouflage the hole Randy dug for the outhouse. Although it was against their communities CCR’s, they both feel it was worth the risk.
Together they took CPR and wilderness first aid classes, and learned how to garden and preserve the overflow. Their first year of gardening had been disappointing, but by the following spring, they’d learned from their mistakes and the garden had richly rewarded them.
At times, the struggle of getting prepared was overwhelming, especially when the company Randy works for stopped allowing overtime and his weekly paycheck plummeted. It was Melissa’s determination that got them past Randy’s initial reaction to give up on prepping for the time-being. She insisted he invest in reloading equipment, and she made it possible by disconnecting their cable T.V. and by growing even more vegetables to save on their food bill. For over a month Randy spent his evenings reloading the bullets they needed and he finished the task just before bullets became scarce and their price skyrocketed.
Randy was still taking mental inventory of their preparedness when halfway to his children’s grade school, the street lights went out. To combat the serious gridlock about to happen, Randy hung a left and drove the back streets, just as he and his wife had practiced. Testing the extent of the outage, Randy tried his cell phone. There was no dial tone.
Once he was within two miles of the school, Randy used the two-way radio. “Melissa, you there?”
“I’m just pulling into the east side parking lot. I’ll meet you outside with the kids,” Melissa said. Her voice was every bit as calm as Randy expected it would be.
Randy pulled into the parking lot next to Melissa’s car and got out to wait. He continued to watch for red flags, not wanting trouble, but ready and able to handle what came his way. Within minutes, Melissa emerged from the school with their six year old son, Brandon, and their eight year old daughter, Sarah. Both children were calm as their mother kept hold of their hands on the walk to the car.
“Mommy said we get to go home early,” Sarah said, her blond hair glinting in the afternoon sunlight, so much like her mothers.
“Yep, today is an early day. When we get home, you and Brandon can play a board game,” Randy said as he buckled the kids up in the back seat of the SUV.
On the drive Melissa stayed close to the SUV’s bumper to avoid their being separated. It was slow going with stops and starts in the gridlock that now blanketed the area. Once they were away from the main corridor of the city, they took a detour to a secondary road and followed a zigzag route home.