Posted on 06/13/2012 9:08:22 AM PDT by blam
Going Deep: “It’s Entirely Possible That Nowhere in North America is a Safe Redoubt”
Eric Peters
June 13th, 2012
Eric Peters Autos
Comments (54) Read by 3,448 people
Some friends have been actively talking about their Exit Plans – about getting out of this country before the curtain goes down. While there is still time. They believe the situation to be hopeless. That despite the upwelling of liberty-mindedness among some, the vast majority of Americans are not liberty-minded. That Americans – tens of millions of them – are stupid, unreachable, mean, irrational, authoritarian-minded Babbits and poltroons. People who always speak in “we” – and lust to control others.
Reluctantly, I have to concede the point.
I have had exhaustive (and exhausting) conversations with countless people – some of them probably a lot smarter than I in terms of raw IQ – who just can’t connect the dots.
Or – much worse – don’t care to.
The problem is as much psychological as it is intellectual. There may just be a defective sub-species of human being, homo servilus, who – much like a bee in a hive – is programmed to crave the collective and therefore accepts its corollary – coercion – as the natural and right order of things.
It’s very easy to get these “bees” to reveal their true natures. Their core antipathy to individualism – and its corollary, liberty. Just let them know, for example, that you find sports/celebrity worship disgusting. Or that you don’t subscribe to any particular religious doctrine – or much care what doctrines otherssubscribe to, so long as they leave you be.
Let them discover that you don’t feel obliged to pay more taxes for “our children” – only an obligation to take care of your own children. Criticize war.
Make a negative comment about cops… .
So, I don’t disagree that jumping ship is probably a smart move. Nonetheless, I’m reluctant to leave the country, for many reasons – high among them just orneriness. This is my country, dammit. I hate the idea of just giving it to … them.
That said, I am beginning to wish I’d “gone deep” when I selected our fallback redoubt. We consciously moved to very rural SW Va. from the Northern Virginia area (near DC) about eight years ago to a great extent to limit our exposure to what’s surely coming. But I am thinking now that we would have been smarter to have moved to rural Idaho or Wyoming or Montana (like Chuck Baldwin did) instead. There are too many Clovers here.
And signs of sprouting continue to worry me.
For example: Several recent “letters to the editor” in our small community newspaper go on and on about how “we” need to raise taxes on real estate so that “our schools” will have “adequate funding.” There is one school – an elementary school in a far corner of the county – threatened with closure because of limited “revenue” and not enough students to justify keeping it open. So the idea was floated to close it and consolidate it with another. “The children” would then get bussed a little farther to their new school. This is an outrage to the parentsites of these children, who believe others should be compelled to provide the necessary “revenue” to keep the old school open for their children.
Everything discussed in terms of “we,” of course. It’s never my children need you to pay for their school.
If I were to speak at a public hearing about this and ask why don’t people who chose to have children bear the responsibility for raising their kids – which includes educating their kids – as opposed to their kids becoming an open-ended claim on the property – on the liberty – of other people who had nothing to do with it… I’d likely be the victim of a mob beating. At minimum, I’d become a community pariah – regarded as “selfish” and “anti-child” (as well as “anti-education”) … because I am troubled by armed men threatening to kill me and take my property so that it may be given to someone else’s kids – kids I’ve never even met let alone had anything to do with bringing into this world. It is no defense, either, that such a policy makes it that much harder for people who’d like to pay their own way to do so.
Other people’s kids take precedence. Over everything.
It never occurs to these “freedom loving” Americans that freedom can’t exist when you are no longer free to say no to being forced to hand over your rightful property to other people to whom you properly speaking owe nothing – other than goodwill. That if “the children” becomes a justification for theft, then any other reason is just as good a reason.
But don’t dare say it out loud…. these freedom-loving Americans will very quickly show you just how much they actually believe in freedom… including even the freedom to speak your mind, if your mind differs in any meaningful respect from the parameters of orthodoxical Republican or Democrat parameters.
The only cardinal sin is to commit non-authoritarianism. To state that you don’t want anything from anyone except their respect for your rights – and are willing to extend the same courtesy in return.
It is a thought increasingly foreign to Americans – even here, in a rural southern farming county 35 miles from anything in most places and often a lot farther than that.
Another example:
In our tiny, literally one-stoplight county, the same government that moans about not having sufficient “revenue” for “the children” recently spent probably several thousand dollars painting at least six “pedestrian crosswalks” in town, complete with “safety man” icons imprinted into the pavement plus signage. Apparently, people cannot cross the street unaided here, either. I have no doubt that tickets for jaywalking are right around the corner. Tazerings for the non-compliant.
Signs of the apocalypse.
There is talk of writing zoning laws – which this county has never had – and which will surely mean The End of everything that made moving here worth doing. People will no longer just be able to freely buy and sell their land, to be used however the new owner wishes. There will instead be restrictions on how a lot can subdivided – and what may be “lawfully” constructed on said lot. I can already see a time when BTK-type “zoning enforcement officers” will be knocking on people’s doors, threatening them with onerous fines (and ultimately, county seizure and auction of “their” land) if they don’t mow it, or have too many cars parked on it or a “not approved” shed built upon it… .
Clovers. The god-damn bastards are here now, too.
It only took them eight years to find this place – and ruin it.
It’s entirely possible that nowhere in North America is a safe redoubt.
What happens, ultimately, depends on the character of the people. And the character of the American people – by and large – is one that reflexively defers to authority – willingly, worshipfully. That happily submits to the most despicable degradation if it will “keep them safe.” And which never fails to speak in terms of we.
So, where do the rest of us – the remnant that still believes in I – go to get away from we?
That, friends, is the question of our time.
Sorry, I don't know either. I'll guess that it's something like a 'hay-seed'.(?)
I know of one; but as soon as I tell where it is, it won't be safe any more.
I loved the term “parentsites” in the article.
You make a good point.
When the SHTF, individual survival means everything.
At that point, patriots, neighbors, and I would seen in extreme situations even your own family will turn and attack. It’s simple human nature.
Not saying that humans aren’t capable of altruism and loyalty, of course they are; but you can’t eat loyalty or honor.
You can eat Fred. Or George. Or whomever. Or alternatively, kill them and take their stuff.
I take a fairly sanguine view of humanity. People will and do band together for the sake of ideal, and we’ve seen that throughout human history, from the American Revolution to the Battle of Thermopolye, from the Bolsheviks to the Nazis; right or wrong, people will cooperate when and idea is on the line.
Take the idea out of the picture, and replace it with raw human survival, then all bets are off. I would modify the headline to read, “It’s Entirely Possible That Nowhere On Earth Is A Safe Redoubt”.
I got the impression 'clover' referred to the pro-government control freaks that were taking over the rural areas...
I can’t find ANYTHING regarding ‘clovers’...might it mean c(ity)lovers?
The socialist scum who are always demanding other peoples’ wealth will be the serfs after the collapse. They are just too stupid to realize gubmint won’t save them.
Ah, if I could only describe to you where I live and the surrounding area...
I own an entire finger of a plateau, about 90 feet over the valley below. You can’t see my house unless you come up a road that, when we first saw it, were a little afraid we were going to come up on a house with an old guy on the porch with a shotgun in his lap just itchin’ to shoot him some city slickers driving one of those new-fangled horseless carriages.
Now we like it that way.
My neighbors have no idea how much money I make, and we all think alike, politically. They are as prepared as I am (some much more so). We are far enough from the liberal areas that the starving hordes would have to get through many people like me to get to me. It would cull the herd.
But, ultimately, “safe” is a meaningless word without a qualifier. We’re a LOT safer than Seattle or its burbs, which is where I lived for 45 years. We considered Wyoming for tax (and other) reasons. My sister and her husband live next to Mel Gibson’s old place in Montana and actually bought it from him a few years ago. They’re ready as one could expect. Kentucky (the part we are in) is actually pretty safe, and our property is safer than most here, but it is also spectacularly beautiful. And with an elevation of ~1,000 feet, it’s more comfortable, heat-wise, than some areas around here.
We moved here for two reasons.
1. If we do not have a SHTF event, it is a beautiful and wonderful place to live.
2. If the SHTF, it has everything we need to be self sufficient and be “relatively” safe. e.g. we get enough rain that nobody waters their lawns here, but we get it like Hawaii. In fact, this area is very much like Hawaii without the ocean.
And remember, when you bury your PM’s put a layer of old nails a foot or so above it so those with metal detectors think the nails are what they were picking up... ;-)
I guess the Bushes knew something when they bought their little 100,000 acre rancho in Paraguay.
clover=sheep?
Our taxes are being raised 10% (legally 10% but with fuzzy math and rounding up it’s a bit more which calculates into way more over the course of time) for the benefit of “others” here. We used to fund our VFW with bake sales and garage sales but they did away with that and went with government grants and taxes which they can’t seem to be able to survive on so are sending out nasty letters demanding a few hundred dollar yearly ransoms if you want them to come out to water down the embers of your home.
There’s a huge percent of illegals so there goes our schools and health facilities. Then we got in a bunch of Katrina “victims” who are building their own compound with free land that falls under church exempt status. Excuse me but just how can they justify a couple dozen brand new houses as the tax free church parsonage? Then there’s the city sprawl that’s eased itself out here. Along with the sprawl comes the libs and other general wackos with all their restrictions and regulations and stooopid ideas. At one time I could count the cars I passed on the way to town on one hand. Today, there’s traffic. While there are still pockets of boonies out there, they are getting few and far between.
>>>It’s entirely possible that nowhere in North America is a safe redoubt.<<<
The real question is, where would it be safer? If the SHTF, and the power of the US basically gone outside the US, would you want to be an expat gringo in Mexico? How about Thailand?
My brother has four acres in Honduras. Would that be safer?
I’m fine with rural KY, at least an hour from any major population center. We all speak English and there are plenty of new and used parts for my stuff.
—Live or die, I’m staying here on my ground.
And I know it better than most. I can navigate without night vision on a moonless, cloudy night. I know every dog for blocks, I know every tree, every rock in the creek.
My ground. I’ll stand on it or die.—
Just an observation. I find it interesting that this kind of talk would have sounded looney or have just been assumed to be sarcasm just six or so years ago. Now it is very common and perceived by no small minority to be reasonable and prudent for our times.
Sometimes I think some of us are like animals that sense and earthquake before it happens.
Yep. Useful idiots.
That makes sense, as well...
And, Ted Turner's 10,000 acre compound in Patagonia. Some years back, Ted was asked what the compound in Patagonia is for, he answered (laughingly), the revolution.
BTW, Ted just lost his title as the largest private landowner in the USA.
a marauding looter from the ‘hood would have a life expectancy of about 4 seconds in this place...
Well, they didn't like what they saw and did something about it.
Those who liked the way it was were used to not doing anything about it, so when something happened they were disinclined to do anything about it.
"...for good men to do nothing."
Agreed.
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