Twisted Spinster

Here’s a long web forum entry my fellow election-day losers may want to read (and the winners too, but they’ll never give up their dream of being led by the Holy One to the Big Rock Candy Mountain) on what to do in case things go haywire and a rich country with abundant natural resources and a civilized population becomes a crisis-ridden dump. I know, I know, this is America, we’re impregnable and impenetrable and invincible and in any case nothing bad ever happens to me. But it’s interesting anyway. It was written by someone who actually lived through a SHTF situation, as he calls it, in Argentina. Those of you who are about to burst into mocking laughter might want to scroll down his site some to where he points out that once Argentina was known as the “the world’s granary.”

I’ve been through a bit of a rehearsal of his situation myself. After Hurricane Andrew basically decimated Miami my neighborhood was out of power for three weeks. I had to stay with friends whose power came back on after about four days (just when we were about to kill each other too —  yes, life in a city with no electricity will turn nice, normal people into psychos, and we were already somewhat psychotic to begin with). I went back to my place exactly once while the power was out, mostly to finish cleaning what little rotten food I had left out of the fridge, and to take a cold shower because I didn’t want to use up my friend’s hot water (power was still rather uncertain for quite some time after). There was widespread looting, and everyone who had a gun set up a guard in their own home. The National Guard was flown in, but it took a while for everything to calm down, and the place was upended for years after. One of the people I worked with lost the home he had almost finished selling and the home he had just signed the papers for (both were in Coral Gables By the Sea, a ritzy neighborhood in south Dade county next to the ocean, which was virtually destroyed) and he and his son and pregnant wife had to live in a hotel for two years. Graft and corruption was rampant in the aftermath as well. Not only was much of the destruction due to the fact that the building codes were outdated and building inspectors were often careless and/or corrupt, resulting in crappy construction (roofs not properly attached to houses, sub-par materials being used), but every thief it seemed in the world got the idea that they could clean up by pretending to be roof repair people etc., and tons of homeowners woke up to find that the “contractor” they had paid thousands of dollars to had disappeared with the money without any of the work being done.

And so on and so forth. Anyway, I do know a little bit about living in near-Third-World conditions. You can’t ever take good fortune for granted.

(Via Sondra K.)