You don’t know anything about my kids. My oldest is well on his way to becoming a trauma surgeon. My youngest has spent the whole summer doing charity work. By the time school starts, she will have completed her goal of building 60 computers to give to kids interested in programming and robotics in our schools, but who cannot afford to buy one. And she and a school friend are doing all the fundraising and work themselves.
We practice the skills we do because we live 10 miles from the nearest paved road, high in the mountains. We often have to do without power for weeks at a time. Nobody plows the roads in the winter, nobody collects the garbage, nobody supplies us with water. There is no fire department, and the State Police are probably elsewhere in the state. it would be incredibly short sighted for us to not keep food preserved and guns around. It was sort of fun to talk about the “zombie apocalypse” when we were trying to involve the kids in doing the sort of things that my parents and grandparents did as a matter of course. I have made my academic career of studying human history in the form of Industrial Archaeology. From my personal perspective, it is insane to discard 25,000 years of accumulated human knowledge about basic living skills because, these days, everything from food to hardware comes in little boxes ordered from the internet, or in little plastic packages from Walmart. We grow or raise the majority of the food we consume, and also supply our large extended family.
I am honestly pretty tired of being told that some committee somewhere has decided that this or that thing that we do or say is no longer acceptable. Zombies are not a euphemism that we use to refer to anyone except the actual living dead, which are a fictional thing. TV shows like “The Walking Dead” are not cleverly disguised racist propaganda.
We are not living in fear, either. Right now, my front door is unlocked, and several cars and four wheelers are out by the driveway, all with the keys in the ignition. There is no lock on our gate. We don’t even have curtains in our bedroom windows. What we do to “prep” means that we don’t have to worry about that category of thing. Plenty of oil for the lamps and preserved food just means that when the power goes out, nobody has to worry about that crap. We just get to read books before bed instead of watching a movie. Is your door locked?
I am sorry if I am ranting again. We had a nice dinner in Santa Fe, and I get home to this. Ugh.
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