A small helping of TEOTWAWKI*, anyone?

New lettuce and spinach are in the ground today here at the homestead, and with the warm El Ninó weather blowing in, it feels a little more like spring than winter around here. 

I spent the morning planting and pruning our roses, and after finishing that, was reading a blog I enjoy. It referenced another blog (one I wasn't familiar with) whose authors have stopped writing due to their belief that a cataclysmic meltdown of society is imminent. The author of the original blog I was reading stated she was also very nervous about things right now, which I took to mean an impending collapse of society, the enforcing of martial law, city types fleeing for rural areas, post-collapse danger, etc.

What some people wish for.

This was a person who, up until today, I considered reasonable -- a fun read on basic homesteading activities. Sometimes you have to wonder where people get these ideas, and what kind of world they live in that leads them to these sorts of conclusions. What could it be? 

I know in some cases it's religious fundamentalism and the belief that we are living in the End Times. The problem with that is, even in Jesus' time, people thought they were living in the End Times. So did folks in the 1800's. So did people during WWII (which I kind of get). 

Honestly,  I think it's a huge warning sign of living a too-small life. I wish I could snatch those doomsday people up for an afternoon and take them to a café on the palazzo in Verona, Italy for some pasta, wine and gelato. People in Europe have an advantage over us in that they can look around them and see 1,800 or more years' worth of evidence of human life in architecture, roads, and art. And  there, subliminally, is the message: life, does in fact go on. Even what seems like the end of the world tends not to be, when it's all said and done.

I also think people sometimes enjoy believing they are living in critical times because it makes them feel more important than being just a blip on the radar screen at the beginning of a very slow and somewhat inevitable decline most civilizations eventually go through. "Not with a bang but with a whimper" and all that, or so the saying goes. It gives their lives  a larger and more immediate purpose to believe they are present at the first shot of a great conflict that quickly destroys everything we are familiar with.

What I wish for.

And so I say, live a rural life, live a quiet life, but also live a balanced life. If you feel like America is headed for some kind of crash, then get outside America and see that despite terrorism, crime and religious extremism, most of the world is still going about their lives as usual, and short of a killer asteroid and combined nuclear strike, the world and indeed our nation will go on as usual, tomorrow, next year, and the day after you die.

TEOTWAWKI? More like COLAWKI (Continuance of Life As We Know It). Have some gelato and rest assured that the sun will probably still come up tomorrow, beginning a day that will probably not be all that different from yesterday or last week, especially if you're on a homestead.

* TEOTWAWKI stands for "the end of the world as we know it."