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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>> Suburbanites will hold on until it is impossible to hold on longer. Of  
> the many human traits predictable, we stay home if we can, huddling in  
> our wooden caves even to death. 


This is exactly what I expect toi see.  Great numbers of people will stay in 
the suburbs and exburbs cold and hungry before they give it up.

I am reminded of the old koan "Things are more like they are now than they 
have ever been before."  To wit:  One branch of my dubious ancestors hails 
from 
a tiny hamlet in Russel Co Va called Hamlin.  My father just gave me a copy 
of 
the transcript of a histoy of Hamlin written in the diary of a fellow who 
lived from 1877 to 1942.  In 1932 the chronicler reports that Hamlin had a 
populationo six hundred and ....

"We have bus running from St. Paul to Grundy [six miles and thirty miles away 
from Hamlin respctively].  We alsohave four busses rinning through Hamlin.  
We have four taxicabs that run out of Hamlin.  The owners live here.  We have 
two pasenger trains running through here daily."

He reports that in 1936 Hamlin had a sawmill, a grissmill [sic], a 
blacksmith's shop, three gas stations, and four stores.  "The citizens owned 
fifty-five 
milk cows, twenty-five head of horses and mules."

My father lived there in 1936 and was nine years old so I could get a wealth 
of details about the particulars.  My great-grandfather owned one of the 
mentioned stores.  What one must realize from this informal history of Hamlin 
is 
that the entire area they are talking about does not extend a mile from the 
center of the hamlet.

My point is this, scarcely seventy years ago, still within living memory, 
communities were equiped to withstand economic adversity even during the time 
of 
this narrative which was the heigth of the  Great Depression.  Almost no one 
depended on personal transportation beyond a horse or mule.  Even in this 
remote (and I mean REMOTE)  hamlet (I wold say 'wide place in the road' but 
the 
road that goes through there is bound by LIck Creek on one side and a craggy 
rock 
outcropping on the other so it has escaped being wide during its whole long 
existence) ... even here and even during a depression there was an 
infrastructure in place so that people and goods could be pass fluently.  
Foodstuffs were 
abundant all around and everyone knew how to grow it and prepare it.

People were used to dressing warmly in the winters and planning ahead.

Now, only seventy years later, people are utterly and pathologically 
dependent on oil based transportation.  Utterly!  And we aren't boiling a 
frog, the 
price of fuel and everything affected by fuel is rising by the day.  
Yesterday 
there was a spot on the radio where the AAA was saying holiday travel this 
weekend might be curtailed because gas was an average of $3.68 a gallon in 
the 
area.  When the spot finished, the announcer dryly said, "Of course, that was 
yesterday, it's now an average of $3.84 a gallon."  Thing are fomenting that 
fast.

Never in the history of the world have millions of people faced the prospects 
of having to grub locally for most of their food and fuel.  In any time in 
history we wish to compare to now, such as this time just seventy years ago, 
people were relatively well prepared to at least minimally eat and stay warm. 
 
Now it is very, very different. More and more people now can't slice toast or 
make a chicken sandwich, much less thrash wheat and dress a chicken.

Very different this time!



James   </HTML>