VBO 3

VILLAGE BUG OUT 3

“A Distant Eden” by Lloyd Tackitt is now on my Top Dozen Bestest Ever Post-Apocalypse Novels list ( I knocked off “The Road”.  One of the criteria for bestest is that you eagerly await rereading the book, after the suitable period allowing forgetfulness so that you may enjoy the rediscovery and enjoyment process all over again.  I’ve never been able to restart “Road”, as much as I enjoyed it once.  “Eden” I’ve read three times ).  I’d also add the two following sequels, one on living off the wild and two on stone age weapon guerilla warfare.  The rest of the series kind of goes downhill, first with a Girl Power fighting unit, then the standard militia porn Mexican invasion, then a Chinese one and then, incredibly, two more about giant monster attacks or some nonsense, the retired gentleman turned writer clearly now off his meds.  But the first three in the series are very unique and recommended.  In “Distant Eden” the beginning of the end as a giant solar flare erupts, is interesting as our hero of the book uses his situational awareness of true human nature to escape the city.

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It would be standard bug-out crap but that is just the beginning of the book.  The focus goes from escaping chaos to bunkering in with a twist.  Rather than desperately clinging to an archaic investment in On Grid real estate, the main character realizes it is just a staging area.  He takes all his food and tools and buries them hither and yon ( not sure why this wasn’t done previously to save time, but the area is in the fertile eastern Texas area so perhaps there was both the dampness issue and the need to use the tools regularly to retain skills ) and makes the house look picked over.  The plan is to retreat to a location in the river bottom to hide out home invasions, then return.  Cooking is done with a solar oven to eliminate tell tale signs of food preparation ( and, most of his food is grain and bean basics.  Well, cornmeal and beans and lard.  Not my first choice as long term storage corn meal is degerminated which removes nutrients and just leaves calories, such as in white rice or white flour, but if he was Storing What He Eats then I suppose…).

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He also realizes he won’t be staying there long.  Once the upstream dam is no longer being maintained they are in a flood zone.  Great area for avoiding the city proper, still close enough to a job, and in a wildlife rich area.  Not great for long term occupation.  It is still suburbia.  His offspring some distance away take a similar approach.  They have sick kids that must wait prior to bugging out to dads, so they ransack the house ( with an observation post at the top ) and set up living quarters in the crawl space underneath.  They dig trenches for walking around and hollow out areas for mattresses, covering dirt with carpet and plastic.  They plan on leaving their real estate investment and never looking back.  Now, granted, the story isn’t perfect.  The children characters are shown as humoring dads apocalyptic obsessions but not sharing in them.  When the flare erupts I have an issue believing two extended families would magically suddenly become Believers and drop all preconceived notions and embrace a prepper mindset.  Of course, the book isn’t as much entertainment as instruction, as admitted in the introduction by the author, so allowances must be made.

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Reading all about prepping is fine, but it won’t make you a prepper after the collapse if you’ve been mired in the improper mindset your whole life.  How you live, how your internal dialog unfolds, they act as a self-hypnosis.  You are brainwashing yourself constantly and reinforcing old behavior.  Once “zombies actually become real”, your old programming won’t suddenly disappear.  It will still be there and be a hindrance to adjusting to the new reality.  That is why I said I doubt the children in the story will suddenly become useful survivors.  They, like all the sheeple, were living as corporate drones, making real estate developers and the local power structure rich off of their misconceptions of investment.  They strove to move up the food chain, displacing worker bees in their accumulation of wealth following the American Dream.  Which is, in reality, legal theft and alpha male dominance, not some artsy fartsy concept that embraces the efforts of all.  The American Dream takes resources and that is what we are running out of.  Duh.  Anyway, this race to the top takes True Believer mindset and that is why you don’t make a good survivalist while chasing said Dream. 

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To Truly Believe that you can accumulate enough wealth to continually increase your status symbols and squirrel enough away to continue the same after retirement, well, you must 100% commit to The Effort.  Which is extracting more resources and removing more of the underclass from this race.  You are “All In” maintaining the Status Quo and your brain has been wired in this effort ( it gets harder and harder to keep, let alone add, to your wealth as it gets scarcer and scarcer and this means far more effort and concentration and True Believer-ness on your part which adds up to no spare room in the computer hard drive for alternate belief systems there Just In Case Of Emergency ).  In short, focus on survival as the current paradigm crashes and burns, OR, try harder to grasp some of the last resources from the burning building.  But not both.  I don’t think you can do both because the mental effort of just one is beyond the capacity of most normal people.  They just shrug, give up any extra effort, self medicate and do what they can as circumstances change.  The minority, you and me and all those Yuppie Scum Survivalists, double down on one of the two behaviors, our fanaticism fueling our fires.  But you are either clawing for wealth or learning to live without it.  Not both.  Don’t take that fanaticism and add its energy to deluding yourself.  Stay clear and focused.  Next article the series continued and concluded, we discuss village fortification verses bugging out.

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