Somewhere between Henry David Thoreau and Paul Ehrlich -- the '70s were a tender time -- I came to intimate knowledge of my inner survivalist. Perhaps it was a dim memory of duck and cover drills, which persisted at least long enough for me to wonder of what possible use they might be. Almost certainly it was Viet Nam combined with the innate pessimism of two parents with hard memories of the depression.
Reading Kunstler's The Long Emergency didn't help any.
But I like to think of myself as a rational pessimist. I have moved to a small town and learned the rudiments of driving my father-in-law's tractor. I have some dim hope of being as useful as a ten- to twelve-year-old farm boy by the end of the summer, but I'll always be many decades of instincts behind. Fair enough.
Sure enough, we have entered, in the words of the obscure bluesman John Brim, "Tough Times." Follow me over to fold to talk about how tough they may be, for there's a story I heard to day I should like to share.
We all know gas is expensive, the housing market is wretched, and food prices are skyrocketing. And in my circle of friends I can reach out and touch a great number of very talented middle-aged people who are either out of work, as I formally am, or into small pieces of work here and there so as to keep in clothes and food and books.
Over the weekend some of my wife's relatives stopped by. He is an established environmental lawyer at a large regional firm. She is a former teacher and mostly stay-at-home mom with two teenagers. He's pretty liberal, she's somewhat conservative, at least religiously. I don't know them well.
She has begun stockpiling food, buying staples whenever they go on sale. Her goal is to have a year's supply in their basement. She's got three months now. I should add that they are not Latter Day Saints.
His law firm has laid off a significant number of lawyers. Now, I know they've acquired (or whatever lawyers do) other firms, and so some of this may be natural winnowing. But the number offered was unnaturally large. He is enough of a partner to share in the quarterly disbursements, only there haven't been any the last two quarters and the firm has had to go into savings to pay its taxes. (I would add that this is a politically well-connected firm in this region.)
In consequence, he has pulled all his money out of his IRAs and is leaving it in cash.
Now, I'm the guy who thought the market was over-valued at 2,000, so I'm hardly one to talk. And I've reluctantly bought into the whole notion of IRAs for a while now, but I've never felt that those monies were any more a sure thing than Social Security, and probably less so.
However you spin this, though, it's troubling. They're smart people. They're reading the same tea leaves we are. And, in their way, they're voting with their feet. Maybe this is just one couple responding out of fears I can't reach out and touch.
But it makes me wonder, emboldens me to ask this broad constituency of very smart people: How bad is it going to get?
I speak peak oil, but not fluently. I believe we're at or past our peak, and that one reason the Saudis haven't perked up production is that they can't (which, of course, I borrow from Kunstler). I take the learning to grow food bit seriously, but in part it compensates for my hopefully temporary unemployment, in part it guarantees us better food than the grocery store offers, and in part it allows me to spend various hours driving a tractor in mindless circles. I have never pretended to understand money, much less other people's money, which apparently one must attract to make great gobs of it. And I have learned, with little enough effort, to live quite happily on a modest income.
Most days I feel a little silly talking about all of this. The world isn't going to come to an end. The right wing isn't going to steer us headlong into Armageddon (are they?). We are clever enough to commit our considerable financial and creative resources to the crucial task of creating renewable energy; we are smart enough to give up those portions of our culture which are unsustainable, right?
But this story, these people, have given me pause. I'm not buying a gun yet, but I do increasingly worry about the world we will leave for our children.