Original Mix

The drawback to forming a community from a large number of survivors who have not planned or formed their communities ahead of time is that one gets the mix of the original community.

• Small survival communities have folks that came there, migrated there to join each other. They already have a higher percentage of folks mature enough to face the facts and make life changes based on that, and ready to live tough times so those they are responsible for (dependents) will not have it so rough. In other words, you're dealing with at least a core of Service-to-Other folks.

• The larger community will not have this selection, but will be as it is today. In today's mix, orientation and motives can be discerned from the amount of poverty, homelessness, folks without insurance dying in the parking lots of hospitals because they cannot pay, abused children and battered wives ignored by the police department, fat cat corporate executives bleeding their workers or running sweat shops, and outright sadists who have learned to operate in the system. So you can't expect any more from the community than you're getting today.

• The generosity of the community often is dependent upon good times, with bad times making the wealthy more protective of themselves and those with goods reluctant to even admit to having them, much less sharing. So crop and food shortages will not make folks more generous, it will make them more anxious and less generous. Not exactly the right circumstances under which to address tightening the belt and giving up the usual way of life and instituting eating worms or whatever. Anxious folks trample each other on the way out of the auditorium when they think there is a fire. This is a fire, or worse.

• Food stores will go down, anxiety will go up, the basic mix in a large community that has not formed ahead of time in response to what is coming will be no better than today.

I conclude that knowledge given to a crowd of survivors, such as one will find in a large city after the pole shift, will reach some individuals who will act on the information, having been out of the loop until that point, but these individuals and their friends and family will decide to leave the community in order to survive. Else they will be eaten alive, consumed, made ineffectual. I don't see it succeeding. But I think offering the advice is something we should do. There may be communities with the right mix, with a mayor who preaches the right stuff at the right time, who are in a protected place where they won't be subject to invasion, and they need all the help they will be asking for, at that time.

Offered by Nancy.