As we lived through our ice storm these last couple of days, it's been
interesting to note the reaction of people deprived of amenities that
didn't even exist when I was a boy...

Apropos of this... (required aviation content, we flew there in the
Dakota, and the friend's house we were visiting was just off the
approach end of the runway)

We took a trip down South, and toured the plantations and such. Now we
live in a house, but it's "just" a house. There's some land, but not a
lot of it. These people lived on acres and acres, and had ten or twenty
=buildings= on their property. This is wealth - a style of living to
which I am unaccustomed.

Or is it?

One of the buildings is basically a very cleverly designed earth
refrigerator. Another is to hold the sheep shearings until they can be
made into cloth. Another is... it goes on and on like this. These
people were self-sufficient, whereas we depend on electricity to run our
refrigerators, we go to the store to buy milk pre-packaged in boxes,
clothing that has already been made and fitted (let alone cloth that
doesn't have to be woven), drive to the gas station to fill up our cars
(which we need to go to the store to buy soap, which we need to buy
because we don't raise our own pigs...) and so forth. Yes, they were
self-sufficient, but they needed acres and acres to do it, and they
needed a staff, composed of slaves or not, but still a rather
significant staff to run the household.

Civilization and its infrastructure has allowed us to do the same thing
with far less land, and far less labor. The result is that we depend on
the infrastructure in ways that would be unthinkable years ago.

Consider that a snowfall can paralyze a city and bring intercontenental
travel to a halt. In the seventeen hundreds, people just walked in the
snow. But we have built an infrastructure of incredible efficiency
(compared to the 1700s), which depends on their not being snow (which is
the case, most of the time).

No electricity, no phones, no TV, no radio.
This was NORMAL.

.... and the expectations were built around this. Civilization,
technology, and infrastructure are a house of cards. They allow many
more people to live well, when everything goes well. But it takes far
less to disrupt it than it did in the past.

One earthquake in the right spot could destroy a modern city. Ten
people running naked backwards through airport security could shut down
international travel. This would not have happened three hundred years
ago. The city would be rebuilt in about two weeks, and there was no
international travel to speak of.

Jose
--
Humans are pack animals. Above all things, they have a deep need to
follow something, be it a leader, a creed, or a mob. Whosoever fully
understands this holds the world in his hands.
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