skills and stuff

SKILLS AND STUFF
Oh, what a sweet and glorious day this is. Chappaquiddick Ted is dead! Rot for all of eternity in the lower depths of hell, you fat horrid troll. I can only hope that the Pope isn't lying like a rug and damnation is a reality, and that you will be gang raped by demons with inhumanly large members studded with twisted and sharp protrusions, your large gaping wounds healing each night that that you can be tortured anew the next day. On the Communist Puke scale, he ranked right up there with Stalin. And at least Stalin didn't have much to do with the suffering of Americans. And I hope your brain cancer hurt like hell. Don't speak ill of the dead? Piss on that, and piss on Teds grave. But I'm not bitter.
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Like almost all the teachings of survivalism, the quest for skills is a good idea. But like most other teachings, there is little moderation. Some things you want to go overboard on, like stockpiled food and ammunition. Other things are faintly ridiculous as far as what is suggested. Rather than a realistic level of skill acquisition, it is as if you were instructed to have all the skills needed to survive on a tropical island. Not that this is a bad idea, but it is far from realistic. Very few of us have the time or energy to become a medic or nurse, a sniper, an urban combat specialist, a wilderness navigator, a ultralight hiker and camper, an armorer, a farmer and rancher and butcher and cook, a logistics officer, a pilot, an off road motocross biker, etc. Few of us can master one or two of those, yet you are looked on as a slacking ho that will end up in the zombie bikers stew pot if you don't learn each and everyone of them. The very simple fact of the matter is that for 99% of us, you only learn a skill that is marketable or a hobby.
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Is it really fair for a farmer or rancher to look down his nose at others because they don't know how to shoe a horse, mend a fence, castrate a bull, create a successful compost pile, or whatever? Of course not. That is his livelihood. If you are getting paid to do something ten hours a day, how can you expect others to pick it up on a few hours here and there between chores and work? Even if it isn't a very good paying job, or perhaps even loses money in the long run, that is their job. In the book "Emergency", the author takes off several years to learn all those survival skills everyone recommends. Gun courses, dressing game, wilderness survival, EMT, etc. Yet, not only were each of those paid courses tax deductible for research, he had several previous best sellers to pay his living expenses during that time. The rest of us don't have the luxury. Even if you win a super duper free course after you write an article about how much you love and worship your AR-15 carbine, you still need to get time off from work, pay for travel, then keep up your training with ammunition that is over fifty cents a round on sale ( unneeded remarks about wasting ammunition in semi mode not mentioned ). For me, just visiting my father who is only three hundred miles away is a huge deal ( I'm going this weekend, so Friday will be a guest article or a movie review ). And I would do that before I went to a gun course. I'm wearing myself out making preparations at work. This is a one man show and keeping the ravenous hoards in food in advance isn't easy.
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Please, for the love of all that is holy and just and good, please, pretty friggin please, listen to me very carefully. I am not saying new life saving skills are bad. They are very good. I am saying that they are very difficult to acquire unless it is job related or part of a hobby you enjoy and use to relax with. So few of us have the needed time or capital. TV, not used in moderation, is a time wasting sink hole of your life. Used conservatively, it has a good purpose. Freeing your mind from the days drudgery. Relaxing. It is a legal opiate. But you must use it in moderation. Even if you give up all TV watching, how much time have you freed? Most of us commute and do chores daily. As food prices and services and everything goes up in price, we will be doing more cooking from scratch, more labor intense chores. We will lose time. Free time will be shrinking, so cutting back on TV will at best be a holding action. If you are being realistic, you have very little time to learn. If you take time to rest and recuperate after work, about zero time. You all get all hot and bothered about doing things the military way, so why would you be opposed to R&R? The most vacation time I ever had was when I was in the military. They must think it is a good idea to give stress a rest.
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By all means, try to learn the new ( or old ) skills needed for after the collapse of civilization. No, having books on the shelf is not a good substitute, but it is better than nothing. Remember Better Than Nothing? We already had that lesson. BTN is not a bad way to prepare for survival. Skills are just like stuff. It might be the best to have a best and shiniest, but if you never can afford the best, you can die with nothing. All because you insisted on the best and wouldn't just get BTN. If you don't think you will have the time to learn a new skill, at least have the book. And eventually force yourself to put aside time to learn new stuff. Crack the book and experiment on a small scale. Just don't expect to learn everything you think you need to know. You can spout the crap about specialisation is for insects, but economic reality says otherwise. You may want to go visit the fantasyland about being a Super Stud Warrior King having all the skills needed to survive combat in Iraq, then be able to stitch up a squad mates wounds, navigate back to base by the stars, then write up your memoirs that gets on the best seller lists, but the reason the combat guys have those skills is because it was their job and they were paid to learn the skills. You are paid to ride a desk and shuffle paperwork. At best, you can go to the range a few times a year. See how much it will pay to quit that job and go learn to survive in the wild.
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Most of us have to lean heavily towards stuff instead of skills. It isn't very reasonable to expect otherwise.
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