Preparedness for when

mardatha

D3 - tell them that you stopped stashing food and used it all up cos it was going off.

GreyQueen

DD&D, you'd like one of my neighbours. She's a couple of years older than me, but looks 20+ years older. She's had 6 kids taken off her in 30 years, all after they'd come to serious harm. She's a junkie and still uses heroin despite being on daily methodone, and an alcoholic. She's never done a day's work in her life but is expert in manipulating those around her.

Some of us have estimated how much she's cost the rest of us; benefits, social services, the Police for her many crimes, paramedics, hospital, you name it, she's into it. She's probably racked up several hundred thousand of state expenditures in the last 35 years. She's hellacious and abusive to her neighbours but consistantly scrounges off them for milk, tins, sugar, baccy, money to credit her meter, use of their telephones, anything and everything you can possibly extract. In the same week as she'd bleated about her poverty she'd shown a neighbour her £60 colour-and-cut and her bagful of new clothes, among many other things.

Would I extend the hand of charity to this woman in a crisis? A woman who torments and bullies and manipulates her neighbours several times daily already? I should ruddy co-co. SuperGran and several other good Christian ladies are counting the hours until she dies of her lifestyle.

I would be charitable to good neighbours, or at least benign-neutral neighbours, which is sometimes as good as it gets in a neighbourhood like mine with a high rate of churn. And good friends and family goes without saying.

But come one, come all? Nope.

Mardatha, have just finished The Death of Grass (it was on the list upthread) and am presently reading The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen. Which is a novel set in a logging town in Washington state, during the 1918 flu pandemic. Very very good. So intense, I've had to put it down for a while to play online.

thriftwizard, allotment shed hasn't been forced this time. Yippee!

And the weeds have grown like crazy on a piece of ground I cleared last Sunday. As in mass germination of weedlings, so soil temp is now high enough to sow veggie seeds. Plus I saw a toadlet, it was curiously-like a newborn infant in colour.....most disturbing.

D&DD

That's a really good book GQ
Yup don't you just love neighbours like that.. I used to feel quite confident that we'd be okay in a crisis but that blinking film put the right wind up me lol (100 mornings) plus watching blackout didn't help..I see the humanity levels dropping round here daily atm but hoping it'll all blow over!! The estate goes through good and bad patches and we're just having a bit of a bad run presently.
Onwards and upwards eh and if all else fails,I'll move


Mar I tried saying that but they still knock,I had a request for my stick blender and cheese the other day,beans the day before plus 2 cigs,that same afternoon sugar and milk.. they hit me after Tesco's pulls away..
Bear in mind I live opposite a corner shop!!

elantan

Still lurking everyone, just don't feel I have much to contribute just now

About the morality though, this is something that has been on my mind since I started reading this thread.

Say it's a case of a bad SHTF like something out of revolution or something, I not sure how I would be regarding my work, do I go and do what would need doing ( could I even do it ) could I beg someone to do it for me? Do I use my diesel when there may be more important things I could use my diesel for, could I leave a fellow human being to the fate which I knowers them and there is no alternative, could I live with myself depending on what choice I make?

This thread has deff had me thinking

GreyQueen

Sounds like my neighbourhood. We have patches of quietness and then the drug activity picks up. SuperGran has seen it all in her 30 years' residence. The drug activity is up at the moment but that will probably cause a few raids, then it will go down again, until the next time. An amazingly few bad apples can make the tenor of an area change of the worse.

SG has had to point out to junkie woman that she, SG, is a pensioner not a corner shop and where the &*$% does she think SG gets her stuff from?! SG being a person who has, over many years, given everything from pints of milk to bottles of shampoo to the harvest festival food from her church to this bliddy woman.

But it never stops, so SG has refused to give any more and now the junkie is hitting up her nearest neighbour, a good woman who didn't heed SG's warnings about how manipulative this woman is, and how she'll take a mile if you give her an inch. Even she's wising-up to it now.

And we have a corner shop nearby, too. I don't know if the junkie has ever darkened their door. I guess she figures her benefits is what she gets to spend on her weed and booze and everyone else should pick up the tab for her groceries.

She doesn't try scrounging off me because I'm far too bliddy-minded to fall for her nonsense.

Elantan, I think that there would be very few people who would come through a real SHTF with a clear conscience. In the book I'm reading, people are trying to hold their remote town in quarantine from pandemic flu. Would you allow a stranger in need into your quarantined town, if you thought that your children would die as a result? The book is very good an conveying the moral distress of horrible decisions.

There's a well-known phenomenon called survivor's guilt, which afflicts even perfectly blameless people who have survived an event which has cost others their lives. Imagine a situation where a person was not perfectly blameless, but had in fact done highly questionable or even murderous things to surivive.

I would expect that once the dust had settled post-SHTF, that there would be a lot of mental distress for decades afterwards, with post-traumatic stress, people sinking into alcoholism and other destructive ways of self-medication, and a rise in suicides.

Just surviving wouldn't be enough if you couldn't live with yourself afterwards.

elantan

Yep that's some of the quandary I am going through just now ... But with work which is kinda bizzare in a way ... And that's before I would even get to the whole, would I help my fellow human being, yes I would, but I would have to be careful as to what help I give them, for instance if I have a UV water filter or something I would need to make sure that stays safe, so I would have to be sneaky, being sneaky and deceptive doesn't come easy to me, in fact I am almost asbergers in some ways, I tend to say/ react in ways that are not the social norms, I tend to say the things most people are thinking ( or slowly thinking ... Maybe three or four steps back) and often get shocked looks and people saying El you can't say that, or trust you El ... It's never aimed at upsetting people it's just who I am

Whilst having enough water etc is deff going to be highly important, protecting the mind the going to be a huge part as well ... As you quite rightly say GQ

nuatha

Protecting my sanity, means I put those I care about first. That is the major reason I prep.
That doesn't mean I would not help others, though living in a similar situation to D&DD describes there are those I wouldn't be going out of my way to help - though they will be going out of their way to take advantage of the situation and expect others to help them - since that what they always do.
There are others who I would try to assist and probably pool some resources with.
Depending on what has happened, we may opt to load the vehicles and bug out, knowing full well that we aren't likely to have anything to return to.

sorryImoved

GQ an explanation please!

I should ruddy co-co?

Si_Clist

D&DD wrote: »

... how far do you go helping people when they have the same chances in life and more in some cases than you do...

Hmmm ... let's see now ...

We live on my State pension plus Pension Credit. However, where the couple up the road are concerned, we would go as far as we can. They're a very sensible family of him, her and young teenage daughter who live a modest lifestyle. Dad's an invalid (if we're still allowed to use that term) and Mum works part time.

Then take the fat childless couple in their 40's who both work full-time less than 2 miles from home. They both drive to work every day, they seem to live on junk food and they're currently having their roof redone, as part of which process they've done away with both chimney stacks. They have a very large back garden which is apparently given over to a collection of sheds and old motorbikes. Should they ever ask us for any help, we are most likely to have just run out of it.

BTW, I'm keeping out of any discussion about the medical trade on account of The Lady Wife's experience with her GP. Suffice it to say that he once dug out a small cyst from the back of her neck and made a complete mess of the job. In due course, the resultant wound turned into a basal cell carcinoma.

He subsequently excelled himself though when TLW noticed that one of her boobs felt wrong. "Nothing to worry about" says he "Boobs are like that". 4 weeks later, TLW presents herself again, only to be told nothing to worry about. And besides, she's due her routine mammagram shortly. Mammagram shows nothing amiss, but we're both convinced all is not well boob-wise, so off we trot to the the surgery and finally see another GP.

Three days later we're at the breast clinic in the local hospital, and 8 days after that, on a Saturday morning, TLW has her mastectomy. The tumour was grade 3, aggressive.

[Deleted User]

Good post NUATHA and really is based in common sense, helping those you actually can because you know them and know their intentions run with yours and it is safe to help them is a very different thing to helping anyone who you know needs help. People you trust not to come back and take all your carefully stored preps the second the opportunity arises is a very different ball game to letting it be known you have enough surpluses to be able to do hand outs, that kind of news would VERY quickly be out on the gossip grapevine and the kinds of folks who turn up on your doorstep might not actually ask before taking what they wanted or care what methods they use to do so. It is a moral dilemma for certain but, at the end of the day it is a personal decision and really and truly, until faced with the actuality of that situation I really don't know what any of us would feel would be the right thing to do!!!