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The author asks the key question:
"The question I’m building up to is: How do we get back to anything that resembles that kind of high-functioning society?"
"The answer is trauma, a set of circumstances that will disrupt all the easy and dishonest work-arounds which have determined the low state of our current arrangements."
Some of us have already performed an exit, a stealth bug-out to small town, rural America. We have done so in the knowledge that urban life will become a hellscape of disease and disorder, of starvation and savagery. When the lights go out, when the toilets stop flushing, when the grocery store shelves are bare, urban/suburban Anywhere will be no place to be.
bfl
I think the population of my little tiny town is set to more than double just this year. There were numerous twenty-five-acre plots near my house, now they’re full of zero lot line houses. Although the city put in some traffic circles, all the same two-lane roads are going to service several dozen times the traffic as The People’s Republic of Tallahassee is only twenty miles from here.
While Tallahassee was bolted down with masks, mask police and one-way arrows on store floors, you wouldn’t have known any of that foolishness was going on in our local stores. A few people were wearing masks, but that was of their own accord. The Sheriff did shut down a restaurant for failure to separate people, but I suspect that was more political than health related. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a country politician.
I certainly agree with his point. I can understand why young people flock to cities, but I cannot understand why they stay in them. With remote work opportunities and fiber optic communications, the cost of living advantage of living in small towns is very compelling at today’s price points.
American businesses should outsource work to rural America. Real estate is crazy cheap in American towns, and an exodus is overdue from Brooklyn to Bettendorf
Galts Gulch here I come!
“the insupportable costs of the shale “miracle,”
Well, he did say the drug underground was active.
Seems he may also be a customer?
I also live in a small town surrounded by farmland.
But folk are not going to thrive on a diet of onions, garlic, cabbage, and hemp.
So the trucks have to continue rolling even if they have to be converted to steam power.
We may avoid this dire prediction by simply refusing in mass to follow the Lib dictat.
We stop letting them tell us what to do and their power is gone.
Just from the photo, I think I know his town. I don’t live far away.
Indeed, all of NY State is in an absurd situation. The best jobs, pensions and health care (besides the relative few on Wall Street) are with government. Everyone just accepts it. In all ways, including weather, it reminds me of softer version of late-communist Eastern Europe
If you can earn a living, and can avoid taxes - Upstate NY is a pretty good place to live. Leftists have mostly avoided flooding small towns with rootless migrants. Cost of living is low (besides taxes) and people are long-term and stable.
Sometimes it just takes a crisis.
The author lost me with this nonsense.
It is simply, factually, false.
We have not had primary local food production since the 1920's, and we will not fall back to that level.
It could happen *if* government enforces it, such as the Greens and the Biden administration appear to wish.
I live in just such a place, it’s fantastic. Like being back in the 50’s-60’s right down to some of the cars, trucks and tractors that drive by. Teenagers hold doors open for me and call me sir. When you hear “dream come true”, this is it.
Just one of dozens of economically depressed Upstate NY canal towns.
Beautiful architecture in most of them. You can tell that at one point they were thriving, prosperous places to live.
Then NYS government happened.
Those small towns will remain a thing of the past as long as NYS hangs onto its corrupt and immoral government.
Just another reason we moved out of NYS.
We just closed last week on 5.75 acres 67 miles north of Where we live now which is the N Atlanta burbs. We are working night and day to get it set up to move to ASAP. Its a rural community of like minded folks. The city is getting really bad. Crime is soaring.
Up here in North Idaho, we have the opposite problem. All our small towns have doubled, tripled, or more in population the past 10 to 15 years. The growth is horrendous and people wish it would stop and we can go back to what we had.
Upstate New York has been on a downward trajectory forever. I grew up there and did a lot of business there in the 80s and 90s. All sorts of business incentives have been tried to arrest the decline, but nothing works. The state was and still is very business-hostile. Like California. They simply cannot jettison their woke-liberal ways to save their states. It’s the same all over the country.
I bought an 80 acre parcel far from "civilization" about five years ago. Built a house and integrated myself into the community. My Mennonite neighbors have told me they will feed me if things get that bad. I own a 65 acre forest with millions of BTUs of stored energy. I have a well.
I have become a simple observer of the fall of the West. Personally, I will not participate.
Sounds like he’s in Dutchess, Greene, or Ulster Counties. It’s where tons of people move “upstate” to get out of the city. NY is actually quite nice if you could separate from the 5 burrows and chuck the liberal all Democrat government.
I moved from Seattle to a county in south central KY, on 32 acres, 11 years ago. Third best decision I ever made. (First is accepting Jesus’ free gift, second is choosing my wife...)
And not to put too fine a point on it, if I still lived in Seattle, I’d probably be in jail over Covid. We ignored the whole thing here.