American denial?

So here is the premise. You and your family are cast upon the shores of a bare and deserted island. You are alone. No one can help you. There are no doctors to patch up your wounds, no inns or restaurants to see comfortably to your needs. And if you want shelter, you have to create and reinforce it yourself. There are only the supplies available on the reef-pierced wreck, and it may be a year or more before you are rescued. What counts is survival—and nothing else.

As I look around my house doing simple things like opening blinds, sweeping the floor, making the beds, L and I are beginning to think like this. This house is our lean-to. Our savings and what food we have on hand and the gas in our cars (or perhaps the cars themselves), the wreck. We are beginning to ask if it is time to begin thinking like survivalists.

What if, for example, we had to live without electricity? What if we rationed our food and water? What if we sealed off rooms and taped doors shut, turning the living room into temporary bedrooms for the kids and shutting heat and power use almost completely to the downstairs? What if we stockpiled canned and powdered goods like cold war fanatics? What if we bought produce in season and canned it? What if we changed what we ate: rationing expensive foods like meat and increasing the amount of rice or potatoes? What if we went to bed and rose with the sun so that we didn't use electricity to see by--our house has plenty of windows? What if we turned half of the garage into gardens for mushrooms or herbs, started raising plants in other places indoors, and turned up not a small portion but half or more of the backyard? Survival trumps a place to play this year. What if we learned to sew and began to make our own clothes? What if we started hanging our clothes to dry? What if we sold everything that wasn't absolutely necessary? What if we started brushing and flossing our teeth more religiously than ever? What if we made an effort to tap into the bartering economy that no doubt exists already in the seams of our community? What if we started making crafts or other items that could be sold on eBay? What if we had to use our fireplace as a cook stove? What if we reduced down to one car?

There is always the temptation to deny reality. I am always the last to give up the way I want things to be and accept things for what they are. None of us wants to believe that the peak oil people or the climate change people are right. None of us wants to believe this is a time when the word is not change or retool or plan B, but it is survival. As in having something to eat. As in having a bed to sleep in. As in the way things used to be, the America that existed even eight months ago, is over and whether it comes back or not is a question left only to the comfortable, such as those who represent us or who laid us off. Is this the most reasonable response or is this a fanatical one? Only hindsight can say. I haven't made up my mind yet, and it is hard to say whether the delay is a sober one or just an act of would-be-middle-class American denial.



And now our case was very dismal indeed; for we all saw plainly, that the sea went so high that the boat could not live, and that we should be inevitably drowned. As to making sail, we had none, nor, if we had, could we ha' done any thing with it: so we work'd at the oar towards the land, tho' with heavy hearts, like men going to execution; for we all knew that when the boat came nearer the shore, she would be dash'd in a thousand pieces by the breach of the sea. However, we commmitted our souls to God in the most earnest manner . . .

After we had row'd, or rather driven, about a league and a half, as we reckon'd it, a raging wave, mountain-like, came rowling a-stern of us, and plainly bad us expect the coup de grace. In a word, it took us with such a fury, that it overset the boat at once; and separating us as well from the boat as from one another, gave us not time hardly to say, O God! for we were all swallowed up in a moment.

Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe