Thursday, May 14, 2015

63 days to starvation



Reading this post EMP novel I came across so many shocking and horrifying things. I think that day 63 was the worst. I have never really been hungry. I have never seen starvation well not unless I was watching late night TV when Sally Struthers would plug away for The Christian Children’s Fund in some far away land. I live in Oklahoma and we are only 80 years passed the dust bowl. But in that time we have lost our comprehension of hunger. We don’t remember the chronology of death in starvation. When Professor Matherson describes the how and why parents were dying of starvation before their children, I was shocked. My only other close calls with starvation, “The Long Winter” Laura Ingles Wilder, “The Grapes of Wrath” John Steinbeck and any number of World War Two books, fiction and nonfiction, the starvation always went from children to adults. The reason is that in those times starvation was known and a plan, though unspoken, was known to all. Men first, then women, then the older children. Babies died first. Our time of plenty we have no concept of how to preserve through famine. I fully believe that that the parents who feed their kids before themselves completely believed that what they were doing was the best thing for their family, firmly believing help was on the way any day now.

I have been watching how my own family interacts. My children eat off my plate daily. They literally take the food out of my mouth. It isn’t any big deal right now because we have plenty to replace it. However in this scenario it would be important to triage our calories. In my food storage I have extra measuring devices because I can’t just scoop and pour foods like I do now because if I am taking 10% too much then the food that I have carefully stored will not last as long as I had planned. Even imagining and trying to prepare for this I cannot pretend that I would be immune from “normalcy bias” because I cannot comprehend anything so harsh could happen here.




After, One Second After

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