This morning on NPR there was a piece on a couple from Portland, Maine (God’s country) who moved to LA where he gets work and she gets preggers. Flash forward and the work dries up along with the credit cards they’ve been living on. Final plan is to move back to Maine and move in with her mother who lives in a small house in the woods. Dad has lost almost everything in the stock market, and can offer no help except access to a woodlot they can cut and sell or burn for heat. Grow a garden, can the produce, harvest deer, all of these are life skills for hardy New Englanders, but it points out how hard this will be for less handy folks.
What if there’s no mom to move in with? What if you couldn’t grow weeds to save your life? What if you didn’t know a chain saw from a chain letter or have a dad with a woodlot? What the hell will the truly unfortunate do?
Obviously this is just the beginning of a huge change in the lives of everyone on the planet. I write about the American parts of this, mostly because it’s what I know. Some other places face really terrifying futures, including China with literally hundreds of millions of unemployed migrants. Pakistan, holy crap, scares me just to type the name. The lunatics running North Korea? Mass starvation and nuclear high jinks.
Growing up, I was certain I knew how I would die; in a nuclear firestorm when the US and the USSR acted out mutually assured destruction. Maybe that’s why I don’t fear terrorists at all. The threat is so minor in comparison. Beestings kill more people than terrorists, so would someone please give me back my civil rights and get on with the police work of arresting and convicting these guys? Thank you very much.
Anyway, we live in interesting times, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how it works out. Best of luck to both my readers!
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