A few hundred years ago, necessity was a fucking awesome motivator, for inventions that actually made a huge difference in our every day lives. Early settlers in this country were doing shit the hard way. Outhouses, butter churning, fuck, forget about refrigeration. Salted meat and a fucking huge bonus to the whole inventors of canning (the French military! Who knew!!). Sure, a lot of inventions were dependent upon progressing technology/electricity, but the difference between having and not having could actually be measured in days. Weeks. The amount of work one had to do before said invention. Or, I suppose in some instances, you just went without.
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| She's old and tired and sure as fuck not going to | teach you how to do this. |
I do actually think about these things more often than I should, especially when I think about the likely Zombocalypse, what skills we’re all going to need to survive. And if you’re one of those “zombies will never happen” naysayers, then fine, in the event of an outbreak that kills 99.99% of the population, there, are you happy, Mr. Buzzkill? You know who you are. At least with an outbreak, the chances of outliving it exist. With zombies it’s all just a nail biting matter of time unless we can figure out what it takes to make them starve.
Back to my point, when’s the last time you heard someone say, “I’m a blacksmith!” “I know how to forge!” “Hey, I can totally figure out where to start a quarry!” “OMG, cheese? Yeah, like I can totally do that without making everyone sick!” “If the plumbing stopped working? Yes, I could totally make a pump and I know where to find the right chemicals to make an outhouse something other than a festering bacteria filled germ pile!” And hell, these are just some of the basic luxuries that I think would be the hardest to let go.
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| "I bet I'm looking pretty sexy to you right now, what with you needing my skills and all..." |
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? If the world as we know it ended tomorrow, what are you going to struggle not to give up? Certainly eating has to be high up on that list… but just like the unhelpful phrase “I vow to lose weight!” unless you outline how you’re going to do that, it’s not enough. Sure, foraging… breaking into the houses of the dead, because THAT will most likely occupy a lot of time… but eventually… All the inventions in the world aren’t going to suddenly teach you what you’d need to rebuild. All this invention around us, making it easy for us to buy food and survive, and we know dick squat about animal husbandry, agriculture, carpentry, plumbing, irrigation, forging, making tools… (yeah, I know some of you have a few of those skills, but how many of us have packed our own bullets???)
There’s a lot to making your every day familiar, and still a lot to making it remotely livable. I know what you’re thinking, we’ll be able to get into these facilities and keep shit going. Like The Stand, we’ll figure out how to get Denver’s electricity up and running again, only we’ll have do-gooders on hand to go turn it on and not charge us for it! Yeah, because there’s no way a power plant employs dozens of people with some sort of training or important job duties that make all of it happen safely, hell, there’s no way one of those pipeswould just accidentally explode, right? And we’ll maintain indoor plumbing! You think someone’s going to decide their number one job is to head down to the sanitation department and make sure shit is getting properly processed? That process most likely requires chemicals that didn’t originate in that spot. Someone delivered them. Someone, who would most likely be dead/living dead. All of that amazing technology, and it’s going to come down to heinous sewage, drinking water, decomposing non-survivors, a resurgence of natural predators (zombie or mountain lion, you pick). Everything that is so easy now is going to suddenly be a monumental task.
Like it or not, current inventions won’t be any help after the apocalypse. They’ll be way too technological for the basic needs we’ll have once the world falls apart. Who’s going to need a heart surgery splint when all the doctors who know what to do with it are dead? And the flip side of current inventions, the As Seen On TV variety, those are going to be part of a distant past where all we worried about was making our cush, First World Problem lives even that much more cush. Omg! Every brownie is a side brownie! I can strain pasta! I no longer have to chew my food, thanks to the magic bullet food processor! My Stopdrop™ is just a sand filled tube that keeps shit from falling between my car’s driver’s seat and center console…but if an apocalypse hits, and I can’t maintain the car or the gas… wtf is that going to be useful for? NOTHING.
And the danger in all this is that we no longer have an understanding of the simple things we use every day, let alone the crazy cutting edge things. We’ve crested a hill. We’ve gone from the every day innovations that make life easier like indoor plumbing, water heaters, and mattresses that weren’t made out of straw, to developments that require specialized knowledge to refine the technology we have. The average person can schedule a program in a DVR, but has zero survival skills to survive any -pocalypse, zombie or viral! Sure, some people have random awesome skills, like that kick ass show, The Colony, where that pansy-ass metal working artist actually had this incredible viable skill and helped them make a forge and solder shit and all sorts of crazy awesome inventions in their little survival community. Ugh, all the shit that would have to be done on a daily basis to survive; foraging, hunting, purifying water… you’d have to work as a group, AND THAT WOULD TOTALLY SUCK.
We’ll be forced to gather together like a group of MTV’s Real World survivors: hunters, metal workers, carpenters… naturalists to tell you what the fuck was poisonous… you’d better hope your back doesn’t go out, because chances are you’re going to be a worker ant, not a foreman.
Douglas Adams was right, we’re all going to die from the germs spread on public pay phones.
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