THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

[Deleted User]

Solidarity is standing together in equal partnership, commitment and belief, it's part OF being a community member and doing your part as a member of that community in equal quantity and quality within the limits of your abilities and experience as any one other person in the community. It's doing the same share of the work that needs to be done to keep the community functioning as any other member of it. Solidarity is shared ideas and ideals and the strength of character and mind to stand together unwaveringly with others who share them.

fuddle

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Mind you - I guess anything is possible - bearing in mind the number of sections of the human race bearing historical grudges for things that happened to their ancestors - rather than themselves personally. Something I find it very difficult to get my head round - as someone that looks to the future myself.

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Though I know my own mother doesnt understand why I havent the slightest interest in history (having been on the receiving end of one that started in the 1930s).

It's no wonder you don't understand then really.

You took the debate to something you have lived through though. You took it to the strikes and the unions not to ancestry which is what I thought you were commenting on.

My family were involved in trade unions, my ancestors weren't. My family were coal miners but my ancestors were farm hands.

My sense of solidarity (did you know of the Polish Trade Union called Solidarity? It was the first Trade Union that wasn't controlled by communist party - well, first country in a Warsaw Pact country. So your google was along the right lines but it could have thrown up a better argument for you. Google is no substitute for historical knowledge really. I digress) comes from being working class. We are more than just miner's strikes you know

Women didn't just fight for the right to vote. Working Class men had to fight for the right too. 'Respectable' skilled working men got the right to vote in 1867, unskilled working class men got the right in 1884 and those who lived at home, were servants or soldiers living in barracks got to vote in 1918. It took the 1918 Representation of the People Act to see universal suffrage to all men - until then only working class me who owned property had the right.

A bit ridiculous, I think, for those soldiers who were fighting in the First World War huh? Fighting for a country that they had no say in because of the job they did.

So you see I feel a sense of kinship, and yes solidarity, with the working class people and because I am interested in what happened historically I can form my own opinions about the life I lead because I know and appreciate the fight that has gone on to get 'my people' their rights.

So no, I don't hold historical grudges but I am aware that I lead a progressive life, with a progressive attitude, that my ancestors didn't and that makes me more determined to live a decent life, make decent choices and be a decent person in my society.

monnagran

100% correct Mrs LW. Solidarity is what most people are looking for and offering to their family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and the wider community.
It is the best way of living to achieve a healthy mind, healthy relationships and a secure and happy community. With everyone striving to achieving the best outcome for the common good.
This is the good solidarity.

There is, of course, the other kind of solidarity that consists of people banding together to sow strife and discord and to re-fight battles that were fought and settled centuries ago.
This is bad solidarity.

It is the never-ending battle between good and evil, and who you choose to join in solidarity, depends on what sort of person you are and, as fuddle says, what sort of history you have.

The only people who choose to join neither side are Narcissists who are solely concerned with themselves and their own needs and well-being.

All of which is enough amateur psychology for today.

[Deleted User]

I think it's hard in 2017 UK with all the ease and comfort that is available to imagine any other way of life. I know we see images of third world and even the poorer eastern, middle eastern and eastern European nations with conditions people have to live in so very different to our own but we see them so often that it becomes remote, doesn't touch us with understanding that it IS the reality for most of humankind even in 2107. 100 years ago we were fighting a war, people in the UK were literally starving because there was no support system like we have today. Go back another 100 years and people were hard pressed to earn enough to feed, house and bury the children they bore and themselves. I believe it was the practise to put aside money each week for the 'funeral fund' they KNEW they would have to have because life was precarious enough to know you'd be lucky to actually raise a couple of kids to adulthood and I believe then adulthood began at the age of 12? certainly you could marry at that age. Sadly this was one of the reasons they died as the shilling could have gone to feed them but then there was disease to factor in and that might kill you as readily as starvation and no funeral fund meant a paupers grave and shame to the family.

We fret these days about Broadband not being fast enough, potholes in roads, who is in power in Government, the NHS not being able to provide ALL the things we think we're entitled to, etc. etc. etc. a long litany of wants and expectations and grudging mumblings that it isn't fair that we won't get the new camera, phone that everyone else has, latest TV with a curved screen the list is endless. The reality is that WE live in the bubble, we are cossetted, protected, supported, educated, mended when we break, entertained, fed wonderful manna from all over the globe without a single thought as to how it happens to be this way. I think the west is in for the biggest WAKE UP CALL in history in the very near future.....I like to think we preppers are at least aware the alarm will go off and possibly already waking up to the future.........watch this space!!!

moneyistooshorttomention

In our western countries basically I see it that there is a huge red line laid down in the 1960s/70s - beyond which there came a point people cannot be pushed. That being when universal access to the Pill/legal abortion came into our societies.

One lesson I learnt from history - my father telling me that his family had the problems it had because there were so many children to feed and clothe and his own family wouldnt have had those problems if it had been present day size of 1 or 2. His father earned a decent income - but it just wouldnt spread over all those "mouths".

This is a large part of why I feel it's irrelevant in many instances to look back to before the 1960s - as that factor alone means "The past is a different country. They do things differently there".

Personally - I've always admired people who stand up for their beliefs/principles (do the Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the "duckling amongst swans" stance). Whether it be through from the solitary hermit/nun/monk living on their own (as does still happen these days) up to anyone rising to lead their society that can manage to do so without the "all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" factor coming into play.

[Deleted User]

Without 'ALL' of the history that happened before them we wouldn't have had the 1960s to be liberated in!

jk0

I've been trying to think of a way ahead for Northern Ireland after Brexit:

I believe people there have a choice of an Irish or British passport. Well, could the same thing apply to goods and services?

Items sold to & from the EU could be treated as being Irish, and items sold to & from Britain could be treated as being British. (I know there would be some fiddles.)

Immigrants coming to Northern Ireland to live could be disbarred from the rest of the UK, and I would guess we would have to check the passports of anyone crossing the Irish Sea.

Any thoughts?

fuddle

The only thoughts I have jko are about division and discord. I think there are a lot of troubles ahead.

Legal abortion? Medical abortion only in Ireland. Western Country. Just over the water from West Wales.

Just going through the SHTF archives; pinecones as firelighters (will be collecting on the school walk from now on) and biscuit tin lids as frying pans! If anyone is thinking of helping with the building our resources I'd say go for it. I'm having a ball reading back. Just from my own bit I know we're going to have a corker of a resource. It's fab!

thriftmonster

jk0 wrote: »

Thanks Money. My thoughts entirely.

I made my mum laugh today:

I said: 'What happens if May & Corbyn both turn up at Buckingham palace wanting to be prime minister? Does the Queen have to do eenie, meanie?'

I seem to remember from my reading that Clem Atlee's wife drove him frantically up to the Palace to form the government in 1946 in their own car because there was some thought that one of the other Labour leaders would try and get there first in an internal coup. (Some of the details might be wrong but that was the gist)

So not so impossible after all:rotfl:

GreyQueen

Looking forward to it, fuddle and all the vols.

I have a bag of dried pine cones in the bike shed here, ready to be used on the kelly kettle just outside, if necessary. They were harvested in the parental back yard, which benefits from the fallout of a pine plantation.

I have eyeballed a couple of pine trees in the city, a few mins' walk away, which are of some slightly exotic pinus with very large cones, which has been slated as a harvesting point in the future.

Re history, I'm a privileged modern member of the working class, by which I mean I'm educated and have a white-collar job. First generation off the land. I know how harsh life was for my grandparents and great-grandparents, from their anecdotes and from reading local (as in local to the very villages) history.

What I bear in mind at all times is that the Haves have never shirked the opportunity to screw the Have-Nots. It's pretty much an inevitable part of any society more advanced than hunter-gatherers, and all across the globe. People strive to become a Have, or to elevate their offspring into the Haves, and sometimes forget that social improvements are achieved by collective rather than individual efforts.

fuddle, some of my ancestors went briefly into Co Durham to work as miners when there was no work to be had as agricultural labourers. Gawd knows what they made of it, they only stayed a few years and came back to our part of the world and farm life.

In the 1920s depression here, a local farmer decided to screw over the local ag labs by bringing in even poorer labourers from Ireland. Plan was to accomodate them in a barracks-like shed on his farm and pay them less than the locals, forcing the locals out of work and their families into destitution.

Before they arrived, the barracks mysterious burned down one night. No one was ever caught. Village rumour said the gallon of petrol used as the accelerant was provided by the local vicar. Heinous act of vandalism, or a community uniting to protect its most impoverished and vulnerable workers? I know what I think of it.

The farmer got the message and no outside labourers were brought in.