Women and Collapse; Or, One Bad Day

It's always interesting to me that people talk about collapse as though it's in the far off future, and as if it will hit everyone, everywhere, at the same moment. That there will be a universal SHTF moment. 


If one defines "Societal Collapse" as:  The coupled breakdown of economic, cultural and social institutions. 


Detroit has been collapsing my whole life. New Orleans had a fast collapse after Katrina. California is well on its way to collapse


I think that "Personal Collapse" can be defined as: The coupled breakdown of economic, cultural and social institutions within people's lives. 


Many, many people are already living in a state of collapse. It doesn't matter if the rest of the world is going merrily on when you've been evicted, your kids are hungry, you have an infected tooth you can't take care of, and you're trying not to let anyone know the family's been sleeping in the minivan.


Years ago, I worked in a family homeless shelter in Southeastern Michigan. Most of the families there were headed by single women. Most of these single women had been married when their children were born. Most of these women had had what seemed like adequate resources to raise their children. Due to divorce, widowhood or job loss, those resources were slowly whittled away. By the time these women reached the homeless shelter, all of them were at the end of their resources.


Women and children live much closer to collapse than either men or childless women. Children limit the work you can do, the places you can live, the people you associate with.


The myth of the welfare mama who's sitting fat and happy is just that...A myth. Yes, you might get food stamps, Federal lunches and Medicaid, but you can't put gas in the car to get to work, even if you can find a job that works around your kid's school schedule. None of the doctors around you take Medicaid, the nearest grocery store is twenty miles away, and the lunches at school are the only thing you kids eat, some days


I had once had a woman, who was bringing donations to the shelter, ask me, "How do women end up here?"


My reply, "One bad day."


My mom and I had a bad day, once.  Oh, there was years of difficult days before that, but she had always worked through them as best she could. 


My parents were solid, upper middle class people, with a home in Suburbia. My brothers and I attended private school. We took trips to Florida every winter and trips to the UK almost every year.


The bad day was the day I told my mom that my dad had a girlfriend. My mom's carefully wrought denial came crashing down around her ears. She then found out that my dad had drained the various savings accounts. She filed for divorce the next day. In the space of a very few days, we went from upper middle class to poor. Just like that.


There were other days, probably, but that's the one I remember, the day my world collapsed.


In short order, we went from the sort of people who gave to charity, to being the sort of people who had to choose between eating and paying the light bill.  


We got through it, obviously, but my mother never enjoyed upper-middle-classdom again. I am left with a fear of empty cupboards and a clear understanding that, at any moment, the bottom could drop out of my world.


Recently, I have been bearing witness to the collapse of other people's lives. Mostly women, some with kids, some without. 


One friend has been left disabled and is now navigating the Byzantine world of Medicaid and State Assistance. That's a full time job, even without a traumatic brain injury. This is an incredibly talented writer and professional woman who, right on the heels of escaping an abusive marriage, sustained brain damage from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. Where did she get CO poisoning? From the furnace of her home which was never inspected properly by the landlords. Her world has ended and she's trying to figure out the new normal. Of course, she hasn't been able to find a doctor who's competent to deal with her complicated medical history who also takes Medicaid.


Another friend just escaped from crazy ex with her kids. He left her high and dry ten years ago, is in arrears for an ungodly amount of child support, and now is making demands. Mostly he wanted the kids to live with him through 2012, because the world's ending. She's afraid of what he might do if the world doesn't end on schedule, in bright, fiery 'splosions. 


Another brilliant woman who had to learn to be resourceful to keep herself and her kids fed.   


Another woman recently confided to me that her world ended in the form of her husband leaving. She's been a stay at home mom their whole marriage because he had vowed to take care of her.


A woman I met lost her husband of ten years. Sudden cardiac arrest. He had no insurance and she'd just lost her job. They were scrambling for the money to have him cremated.


The list just goes on. Most of these women are hanging on to their housing, but by a thread in some cases. 


The best preparations are in your own head. Someone's world collapses every day.


I've been laughed at, often, over the years. I've been called a paranoid many times. However, I am not worried about the end of THE world, just my world.


I'm preparing for that One Bad Day.

Life with part-time electricity

What would it be like to live with eight hours of electrical power per day, in a first world country?
John Robb is thinking about it, especially in terms of national decline and collapse scenarios.

What would it mean for us, up on our little mountain?

So much of our life, even the way we homestead, is based on steady access to electricity.  Our water supply is a well, and its pump draws on household current.  Electrical light is crucial to doing work and being relatively sane during our long, dark winters.  And so many appliances require Edison's trickle: the clotheswasher, the refrigerator, and of course the modern world of digital communications: laptops, modems, X-box, etc.

One hopes that the eight hours of electricity are predictable and they coincide with the evening need for electricity. Say 3:00 PM until 11:00PM or 4:00 until Midnight. This way, the dark days of autumn and winter wouldn't become completely intolerable.

A brief peek into an unspecified future, as imagined by Ceredwyn:

So, winter: Electricity turns on in the afternoon, after the kids come back from school. Which is good, because it gets dark at 4:00. Husband has been running his computer (and the all important Internet connection) from battery power. The batteries were the best we could afford, deep cycle marine batteries that charge on a small solar panel. Failing that, we charge the Lithium batteries on our devices from the wall sockets at 4:00.

The gas stove usually works without electricity, but the oven does not, because it has an electric ignition. If we want to bake, now's the time.

It's also the time for showers and filling up our water containers. Fortunately for us, our septic is downslope from the house, thus we only have to pour greywater into the toilet to flush it. If the septic required an electric pump, we'd have quite a predicament.

We heat with wood, so we're pretty cozy. It's tough for the neighbors who have electric or gas heat. They both require electricity to run.  The fire dept has more alarms these days for people using makeshift heat sources.

The refrigerator gets plugged in, the melted snow that's been keeping it cold gets replaced. Of course, the food that needs to be frozen is in a locked freezer out back, packed with snow.

With the power being off 16 hours out of 24, I'm more inclined to can things than freeze them, and, of course, there's the stuff in the root cellar. Not telling you where we built that, it's well covered to discourage the casual thief.

In the evening, we indulge ourselves in those 20th Century pleasures, movies, music that we don't make ourselves or video games. The lights also make reading much easier. We power up whatever devices have rechargeable batteries.

Clothes are washed in the washer and hung to dry. Dishes for the day are done, no leaving anything for the next morning.

11:00 comes all too soon, and there's no real point to staying up once the power's off.

Summer's a little different because we don't rely so much on the electric lightbulb. There's also the fridge and freezers to consider. Basically, we use the freezer and fridge like one might use an ice box. When the electric comes on, we put the cold packs (We have quite a few large ones, we used to use for camping) in the freezer to freeze. Before bed, we put them back in the fridge.

Bedtime is when the electric shuts off. The electricity turns on at 3, the hottest part of the day, and shuts down at 10:00.

This is when living up north in a rural area pays off, our house doesn't need much in the way of air conditioning. We also moved our bedroom to the basement from the top floor. I'd like to install a sleeping porch if we ever get the money.

If one is lucky, one has some sort of solar panel or wind power set up. This can often supply electricity for the 16 hours of the day when the grid is off, but solar and wind are both prohibitively expensive to get started. One can also use gasoline generators, but again, very expensive, especially if the gas is expensive.

Expense is a problem in another way; the electricity we do get isn't  $0.11/KWh anymore. And it just keeps going up.

Feeding the soul

I, Ceredwyn, have spent a considerable amount of time and money this spring working on our flower garden.  I have doubled the size of our rock garden, planted a bunch of flowering plants and herbs.

I haven't done flower gardening in a major way before.  It's always seemed impractical and I am nothing if not practical.

One big practical reason for cultivating flowers is to give our friends the bees a hand and to attract other pollinators (I've seen a few hummingbirds).  Bees are dying and no one is entirely sure why, so they need all the help they can get.

More than that though, I am coming around to the notion that art, be it stories, drawings, music or flower gardens, becomes more important in austere times rather than less.

I had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, to go to a show where two gentlemen were doing an act straight out of the 1900's.  Their instruments were banjo, harmonica, jaw harp and their own hands and feet.  As well as being fine musicians they were historians and reenactors, giving us a wonderful lesson in musical history.  I learned how the banjo originated in West Africa and it was once made of cat gut and gourd.  They showed us a musical form they called "hambone" that uses nothing but the rhythms one can produce with slapping hands and stamping feet to accompany the sound of singing voices.

The songs they sang were traditional and their act vaudvillian, but you could see that they were performing the direct artistic ancestor of punk, rap, and hip hop.  Not the polished stuff the corporations keep trying to sell us, but the stuff that catches on in spite of the bosses and the banksters, the robber barons and the overseers.  The "What the hell is that noise?" songs that get the church lady's knickers in a twist.  The songs that slaves sang to remind themselves they were still human.  The songs that the strikers sang on the picket line, 'cause it was cold as hell and singing might possibly keep you warm.  The songs protesters sing because it gives them the courage to march into lines of riot police.

Song and dance require no equipment.  Instruments are nice, but can be improvised.  The visual arts are a bit more difficult, but people manage.  In any urban landscape, one can find graffiti artists.  Their chosen medium walls and cheap paints or inks.  Even a bit of charcoal on a concrete floor is can be lovely.

In some of the most distressed parts of the world, women still adorn themselves in fashionable clothes, even if it's under a chador or niqab.  Astonishingly, in Haiti, one category of business that still thrives is the hair stylist.  The people are very meticulous about their clothing and presentation.  A trip to the clinic requires that one be dressed as well as one can afford.  It is a mark of respect, both to the doctor, but also to oneself, using the art of fashion to raise oneself up.

As a teenager in the eighties, I was part of punk culture.  We shopped at Value Village cause we were broke and our ripped jeans were mostly natural.  I was never extreme, but I knew people that were.  The kids who wrote for six hours a day and published little 'zines, or painted, or played some instrument instead of doing something "constructive".  We never went out to events that cost money, because we never had it, so sometimes we went to listen to unknown bands play.  Some were good, some weren't.

I have noticed for a long time, that the more one spends, the less one creates.  When you can buy cool and pretty art that's a million times better than what you can produce yourself, why bother?  Art becomes a thing "talented" people produce.  It becomes something that only an "artist" can create

But always when the money's tight and people are living on the edges, art appears.  Angry art, desperate art, sad art, peaceful art, even joyful art; anything but polished "high" art.

So maybe I'm flower gardening for the Revolution or against the Man.  Anyway, it's nice to look out of my window and see the flowers bloom.

Mutual Aid. Citizen Action Triumphing Over Adversity--Again

On the BBC this morning I watched the various pictures coming in from Japan.  Evacuees in shelters, empty store shelves, devastated landscapes.  It's cold there and people have been out in the weather.  Right now, hypothermia is a bigger danger than radiation sickness.

For all that the news is grim, what strikes me, is the overarching theme to many of these stories.   The Japanese citizens are not passively waiting for rescue, nor allowing themselves to descend into chaos, but rather standing up and getting the job done.

I saw a story this morning about a tiny Japanese village of about 800 people.  They're cut off due to the condition of the roads.  Rescuers have been bringing in supplies by helicopter, but it's not easy and the supplies are not nearly enough.  As always, the biggest need is water.

The reporter names some young man who has "emerged as a leader" and is organizing makeshift mass water purification.  He tells the reporter that currently, "The water isn't clean enough to wash our faces."

The video shows an elderly man using a small power tool to remove the top from a 60 gallon metal drum to make a fire in.  They're using melted snow and puddle water, they filter it and boil it.  They are supplying 800 people this way.

If they waited for the authorities, they would be 800 more casualties.

When I talk to people about preparing for disaster, I always say, "The most important preparations are in your head."

What I mean by this isn't that you should go out and take classes in survival,  although skills are always good, but that one needs to get a survival mindset.

Since 9/11 disaster survival psychology has become a oft-studied subject.  Some interesting conclusions have been reached.  It appears that the Mad Max everyone-for-themselves attitude is one of the LEAST conducive to individual survival, second only to the "I'll wait for someone to rescue me" attitude.

The best strategy for survival?  Mutual aid.

EMT's, firefighters, cops, doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers and other helping professions are the people most likely to make it out of a disaster.

"OK," one might say, "I understand EMT's, firefighters and cops.  They have specialized skills, but what about the others?"

The answer is that they are HELPING professions.  In all of the various studies that looked at this, it has been discovered that those people who help others increase their own odds of survival.

The reasons why are numerous.  People make less reckless decisions when they have other people to worry about.  A group usually has a mix of skill sets.  A group can accomplish more tasks than an individual.  A group offers mutual protection.  A group lessens anxiety and increases alertness.

The first thing people do in a disaster is look for others.  We mill, we check in with each other, we look for consensus.  If there's no plan, we look for a leader.  Often that leader is the one who says, "The exit is that way."

A survival mindset is not about becoming that leader, although that may (and most likely will) happen if you have given any thought, at all, to disaster planning, but understanding that there is nothing so vulnerable as a human being alone.

This is not to say you put aside your own needs for the sake of the group, but that you care for yourself for the sake of the group.   In the fire service we say that the first priority is yourself.  The second your fellow rescuers.  Everything else comes after that.

If you want to survive a disaster, find someone else to look after.  Don't wait for the "proper authorities" to come to do it.  They're too far away to help you.  Whether it's a burning building or a hurricane, you put yourself in more danger if you don't attempt a self rescue.  And you are the only rescuer who can get to your fellow victim in time.

Grab hold of someone's hand and say "The way out is this way."  Keep enough water purification chemicals on hand, that you could share.  Tell someone you'll hold their baby while they eat.

This strategy has worked for our species since the first clever monkey said, "Hey, guys!  There's lots of food over here!"

What Are We Prepping For--Thoughts on Japan

I've been following the news from Japan pretty closely this morning.  I've also seen some blog posts from online acquaintances, who've had their electricity turned back on.

Grim stuff.  Although the doomers are moderately better prepared with food and fuel, etc, no one is prepared for this kind of thing.  Not really

It got me thinking about my own disaster preparations.

Up until the last couple of years, many of my friends (who were not doomers themselves), have often looked at my "preps" (doomer nomenclature for the preparations one makes against disaster) with a mixture of amusement and indulgence.  Most of them probably figured that, as long as I didn't go off the deep end and become a card carrying survivalist, it was just that I had weird hobbies and I was a little paranoid.

My husband became a real prepper about ten years ago after a nasty ice storm we had when we were living in Shreveport, Louisiana.  We lost electricity for ten days, but we had water, food and heat because I was a little paranoid.  Bryan got it.

I'm not prepping for a "Mad Max" end of the world scenario.  I'm prepping for the more common End Of The World As We Know It (referred to in doomer circles as TEOTWAWKI) scenario.  You know, the one where your world ends, not neccessarily the world.

Now, in Japan, it is the end of their lives, as they've known them.  Like Katrina survivors, like Haitians after the earthquake, like Americans after 9/11, there will always be a Before and an After

The news reports are horrific enough, but the blog posts I'm reading from the people on the ground are so much harder.  BBC talks about people queuing up for food and fuel, and some of the blog posts talk about people listening to the radio to discover what stores might be open.

Interestingly, there is a tone of surprise from the BBC for how darn orderly it is.  They go on to say they're sure it would be different if it happened in Britain--as if British culture had become especially hooliganish.

But the reality is, in a disaster people become more helpful to each other.  Chaos only sets in after the social order has broken down.  And, indeed, the Japanese are sturdily maintaining their social order.

My thoughts and prayers to the Japanese people.

Pens and M&M's

I've been asked several times, what I would take with me to Haiti if I went back.
I always reply "Pens and M&M's".

More on M&M's in another post.  Right now, I want to talk about pens.

Last week I was running errands in town and I was writing a lot of checks.  Halfway through the morning, I lost my pen.  My experience in Haiti really made me notice having lost my pen.  As an experiment I spent the next couple of hours using other people's pens and noticing using other peoples pens.

Pens are a funny thing.  If you have them, you never think about them.  You lose one, you find one.

You walk away with someone else's accidentally and unless its one of those fancy expensive ones (which I never use anyway, because I hate the way they're so heavy in my hand), its a sort of "no harm, no foul", thing.

If I need a pen, I can borrow one, I can buy one, I can even steal one with little fear of retaliation.  Societally, we don't even register it as theft.

You will know the world has ended, when there are no pens.

It's a terrible feeling for there to be no pens.  No pens, not even a pencil.  It felt like everything else could be replaced or jury rigged.  You can give less or save it for those who are in dire need.  There's always some technique or Macguyver-esq hack you can try.

No penicillin?
All right, we've got amoxicillin somebody sent us.

Running low on normal saline?
Shit.  All right. Only give it to the ones who really need it.  

No pitocin?
Damn it. All right, I'm going to show you how to do uterine massage.

But pens...That's like the last thing in the world you can do without.  Hospitals run on paperwork.  Even if the paperwork is only to remind you what you've already done for this patient.  You need to record vitals, drugs given, treatments, symptoms.  Even if you're not actually in a hospital, you need to record what you've done for a person.

Pencils might do it, but you need to be able to read what you're writing.  If you have a lot of paper together, the pencil smears. And pencils seem to come from the same place pens do.

This begins to apply to all those little ubiquitous supplies that we think nothing of picking up when we start to run low.  Often we have to have a whole system for getting rid of the excess.  Sticky notes, labels, markers, trash bags.  These are the things that will disappear in SHTF collapse, because everyone always thinks of toilet paper and MRE's.

Me, I'm putting aside a few boxes of pens for the next time I have to deal with some variety of collapse.