What Does Survival of the Fittest Mean to You?
Do you have what it takes to survive with nothing but the clothes on your backs?
I know what it means because I was trained to be a soldier in the once greatest Army in the world. Part of that training involved schools on how to survive with next to nothing for 3 plus weeks when you have been upended in hostile territory with near to no food, water, and basic essentials like matches to light a fire.
SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) schools are only for certain military job categories such as pilots and special forces soldiers, Rangers, SOF teams, and such. . They teach you the basics in an outdoor classroom of sorts the 1st week and cut you loose in the boonies for a couple of weeks all the while chasing you like you are an escaped POW.
The trick is to survive the two or so weeks without hurting yourself or getting caught. You make it to the end but you are very hungry, thirsty, and tired from lack of sleep. My last school like this was at Camp McCall just outside of Ft. Bragg, North Carolina back in February of 2002. Just before we deployed to Afghanistan.
The other 99% of the human race does not have the opportunity for such training. There are survival boot camps run by former active-duty military members but they are largely more expensive than the average person can afford nor would the average person pay to be put through the type of hardships that this training would require for three weeks or so.
So where does that leave everyone when the shit hits the fan? When the food and water run out (and it will) due to global warming continuing to create more arid lands around the world, countries will go to war over the dwindling resources to satisfy the blood lust of the citizens who are hungry and don’t care where the food and water come from at any cost.
Countries will free fall into economic meltdowns as resources become unavailable except to only those who can pay and even that will eventually fail. As all of this comes to pass, masses of humanity will die off of starvation, dehydration, and diseases as medicine will cease to exist as well. No resources to manufacture more.
This is all in the foreseeable future, likely within the next 50 years or so, unless some drastic, worldwide mandates come together to shore up against this inevitability. Global warming-climate change is upon us now. We have been seeing it phase in over the last 50 years or so, according to scientists.
I started noticing it back in 2014 as I used to live in a harsh winter climate region and we experienced more severe than normal cold temps for a couple of winters in a row, then things started warming up.
Snowfalls have become less, temps warmer than what anyone alive could remember and it keeps rising a little more every year. This year, record-breaking high summer temps broke all previously known records going back nearly 150 years. Temps around the world are breaking all the previous records this year.
There are severe droughts around the world, especially in the desert areas such as the Arabian Peninsula, the desert area of the African continent, South West North America Northern Mexico region, and so on. These will continue to get worse as the climate continues to warm up. Cutting down all of the trees in the Amazon rainforest certainly isn’t helping things.
With that comes the spillover into, currently, less arid areas because as rainfalls diminish, savannahs and other grassy plains will start to dry up increasing the regions of desert barrenness.
Once these desert areas become too hot to support life, the life that is there now will move elsewhere to survive. This is already happening in several of the aforementioned areas. This will only become worse. In the areas that the climate migrants relocate to, the resources are not sufficient to handle the masses so conflicts arise fighting over dwindling resources and more humans die fighting over said resources, and so on and so on.
As one of the more prolific writers I am following on Medium, Umar Haque, writes in a recent article, “Are We Doomed? Hug Your Dog, Because I’m Going to Tell You”. A mass extinction event is coming. Probably by the end of this century, he writes.
So, I ask the question again. Do you have what it takes to help you and your loved ones survive all of this? You will be forced out of your homes by scavengers with more members in their pack than you have family members, maybe better weapons, and a vicious hunger for what’s yours. Once you are on the run from the desperadoes, you will need to figure out where to go and how to get there safely with your families in tow.
You will need to know how to forage for food off the land, make a fire without a lighter or matches, and how to camouflage everyone to hide from predators, humans, and others. How to defend yourself if cornered against previously mentioned predators. Can the average western civilized human manage all of that? Not likely. Most will die by violence and misadventure, starvation and pestilence trying to survive the onslaught.
The few who do manage to survive the initial winnowing of humanity will learn to set up in small tribes for resource management and self-defense. Not all of these groups will be made up of nice peace-loving humans. A large portion will be made up of foraging gangs looking for anything they can get their hands on. Food, water, weapons, slaves, and any other resource they can take by force as needed.
If anyone remembers the old Mad Max movies from Australia, that will give the reader an idea of what is coming on a global scale. Not all areas will be desert-like in those movies but the fight over the resources in more humid areas will be just as bitterly fought over.
Humans will have died off by the billions by the time things settle down to a dull roar with feudal tribes fighting over what’s left. Cities will be bombed out, burnt relics of the past glories of humanity.
As a former soldier and poor farm boy with expert training in survival in all types of wilderness situations, I suspect I will likely fare better than most if I am still alive by then. When it is my time, I prefer to go to the eternal darkness in my sleep rather than fighting for my life at my age.
I will train my grown-up children on how to survive to protect the grandchildren, especially since the two oldest were also soldiers. Can you say as well? How far are you willing to go to survive? Can you kill wild game and humans to survive? Are you predator or prey?
I am working on my survival kits as we speak. Some things I saved from my soldiering days and new things to stock the bug-out bags. I am stocking up on ammunition and watching the world outside so I can move as needed quickly and quietly.
That is the existential question of the current moment as we watch world governments slowly collapse around us into fascism, theocracies, and authoritarianism. Wildfires burning around the world and floods wiping out towns and small cities. Violence is on the upswing everywhere, especially in the United States.
How prepared are you for the real-world Mad Max scenario? The very realistic new world order coming to you within a generation or two unless enough people get together and put the brakes on.
This would take a worldwide commitment of not only yourselves in the present day but convincing your children and grandchildren that this is coming within their lifetimes and to step up or, very likely die before reaching senior citizen status. Are you a climate warrior or an armchair wannabe?
