Teamwork for Suburban and Urban Survival – Part Three

Tomb­stone, AZ

Yes­ter­day, I fin­ished up the post by illus­trat­ing the old west.  Wouldn’t it be great to roll up on a small town that is iso­lat­ed from the rest of soci­ety, is self suf­fi­cient, has a great agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ty, steel mill, pow­er plant, hon­est peo­ple with good skills, etc.  Good luck.  No such place that I am aware of.  I know of a cou­ple of iso­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ties, but they are rag-tag at best.  Even if you were to find one of these iso­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ties, chances of you being accept­ed by the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion would be a tough call.  Most of these com­mu­ni­ties are sus­pect of any­one that comes along and tries to inte­grate them­selves, espe­cial­ly in a post SHTF sit­u­a­tion.

If you are already work­ing with a team of trust­ed friends and advi­sors, you could make this a per­ma­nent res­i­dence if you have not already thought about it.  This assumes of course you already know of a place like this.  In my busi­ness, to do this, I might have to com­plete­ly change my career, income, lifestyle, etc.  Again some­thing I have occa­sion­al­ly writ­ten about.

Now that said, I grew up in a small town.  It is not all wine and ros­es… I am not going to get into the rea­sons why here, but suf­fice it to say, if you are not used to it, then it could be cul­ture shock.  I know peo­ple that have moved from NNJ, NYC, Long Island, etc. to PA only to move back in a year or two because they had unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions of income, lifestyle, etc.

What next then?  Learn what you can about every skill you can.  Don’t sweat how quick­ly you need to learn them.  Just do it a lit­tle at a time.  Make a list of skills you want/need to learn.  Do what I do, and make a list of books on Amazon.com, save them to your wish list, and buy one occa­sion­al­ly, read it, and put what you learned to use.  If you have to, you could pack your books and bring them to your BOL with you, and you still have a ref­er­ence library to prac­tice from.  But just as impor­tant as that, once you learn the skill, con­tin­ue to use it, and acquire the raw resources you will need to per­form that skill.  Once you do that you will have some of the resources you might require for a short term SHTF.  You may find your­self in demand in a com­mu­ni­ty that requires the skills you have if required. Not a bad posi­tion to be in, if you ask me.

Now, none of this is worth much if your friends are not of the same mind­set.  Remem­ber this series is about a team approach.  Once you have real­ized that you and your friends can­not do every­thing on their own, you need to sit down with your friends and con­sid­er what skill-sets will be essen­tial to the group, and what will be sec­ondary as well as ancil­lary.  Con­sid­er whether they are going to be used dai­ly, or whether they will be used on a “just in time” basis; rather used when need­ed only…

Here is a list (ad hoc) skills that I have thought about that make sense for dai­ly sur­vival in a SHTF.  I am bas­ing them on the five basic needs of sur­vival:

• shel­ter,
• fire,
• food,
• water,
• secu­ri­ty

In each of the above cat­e­gories, there are many sub cat­e­gories.  Such as “secu­ri­ty.”  Most peo­ple may think that secu­ri­ty may just be self defense of prop­er­ty and fam­i­ly.  I am going to go out on a limb and say “secu­ri­ty” includes edu­ca­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and more.  Both com­mu­ni­ca­tions and edu­ca­tion can lend them­selves to phys­i­cal and intel­lec­tu­al secu­ri­ty.  I will try to illus­trate them in a list in part four of this series.