Ten Reasons Why You Will Be Useless In A Genuine Disaster

Recipient: Cary Jeffries
Sender: Doug B.
Received On: 8/6/10
Subject: Ten Reasons Why You Will Be Useless In A Genuine Disaster

Damned if this feller ain't the most cheerful cuss you ever did want to read?!
The most depressing part of the other side of this coin is that he's probably right! ~ Cary

Why you will be useless in a genuine disaster

1. You cannot live without the Internet
Most of you reading this cannot yet conceive of how
big a deal this is. It's one thing to know that you are
going to be away from it for a few hours or a few days,
or even, possibly, weeks. The idea of a future where it
does not exist for you at all is unthinkable. Technology
has become a substitute for having big things in your life,
a diversion that fools you into thinking that it has every
thing you need. The Internet is no longer a mere a tool,
it's a lifestyle, and when cut off from it people will be
forced to faced reality, only without the callouses they
would have built up had they been spending their time
outside and around people instead of surfing the web.

2. Too sedentary
If you are used to a life of sitting on your ass all day
and moving at your own pace, you will have a hard
time adjusting to a life where movement is absolutely
necessary. Hardship usually involves having to do
stuff, run, hide, forage, find or build shelter. Note also
that there will be no place comfortable to sit and while
away the hours anymore. No ergonomic chairs, no
memory-foam mattress. Your whole world will be
turned into an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place.

3. Destitution is boring
Basically, when you are not moving you get to sit
around and think about how unhappy you are and
how the future can only be worse. When you are
moving you are doing mundane, repetitive tasks that
you have no choice but to do. Try to start a fire,
pick some more maggots out of your wounds, try to
find an effective toilet-paper substitute etc... This is
why homeless people start smoking crack. There
comes a point where life feels like a failed enterprise
so why not? Why not just admit that there is no way
out of this and do the only thing you can to make
yourself happy? But what if things are so bad that
there isn't even crack to be had or you are too broke
to afford it? Then there is sex, which is why poor
people have more STD and babies.

4. Too much competition
You presently have no idea what competition is. You
have not competed till you have fought for food with a
bunch of other starving refugees. Picture being in a
battle with people for the most important thing in their
lives at that very moment. In a large-scale tragedy you
will face a lot of this. When you are down on the
ground amongst the other desperate people you will
know what "cutthroat" means. This kind of thing calls
for ruthlessness and selfishness of the highest order.
Like it or not there are situations in life where the only
choices are to be vicious, or die.

5. Not ready to do what it takes
You are not ready to eat out of a garbage can or steal
food. You are unprepared for the occasions that call
for you to throw out all your values and previously held
ideas of things you would not resort to. Bad situations
destroy your ego and all ideas of self-righteousness.
The people who survive things are not nice people. They
are snitches and thieves and murderers.

6. Your skill-set is useless
Ok, so you are an excellent web-designer. Awesome.
Now imagine you and your children starving starving.
Are you going to eat your knowledge of PHP? Imagine
yourself in a refugee camp in a destitute nation at war,
no Internet in a hundred miles. Imagine yourself
living on the street, an educated homeless person among
thousands of educated homeless people.

You have the skills to survive within a certain framework,
one with roads and local government and order. Should
that framework be destroyed an illiterate Mexican
field-worker or a deranged veteran who has been homeless
for years are more functional than you.

7. You expect reasonable behavior
You expect people to abide by certain rules, to be
governed by basic societal manners. But, when people
are bitter and violent that does not happen. You know
those abusive husbands who beat the crap out of their
wives for some little thing? It makes sense to them,
and they feel they have the right to do it even when it
doesn't make sense, just because they feel like beating
somebody up, causing some pain. Well the world is
full of them, and when things get desperate and and
ugly for everybody, they multiply. Some people are
governed simply by whim, by the need to vent some
malice, and if you are the most convenient thing on
which to vent then you get hit. You, on the other hand,
who expect people a warning when people are going
to do something bad. You who are ready to believe
that most people are good, you get sucker punched,
you get kicked and are left bleeding in the street
wondering what you did to provoke that.

8. You take luxuries for granted
The retailers have succeeded in convincing much of
humanity that a cell-phone is a necessity. It is not. It
is a convenience, and a minor one at that. A car is a
big, significant convenience, but still not a necessity.
There is a difference between neat toys and the
essentials for survival. You can live quite well without
a cell phone or a car. Without antibiotics, or shelter in a
cold climate, not so much. Thanks to big business the
lines between necessity and luxury have been blurred.
Few people these days know what they absolutely
need, so they go broke buying all kinds of toys
that are less important.

9. You have not suffered enough
You are pampered, soft, genteel, used to a life where
the worst possible thing is your car breaking down, or
gaining a few pounds. When the real disaster starts
happening suddenly you are out of your depth with no
tools for handling a real, drastic change in circumstances.
Weekends camping in a park do not train you for a life
of homelessness where there is no reasonable hope of
ever having permanent shelter again. A few quick fights
in high school do not prepare you for having to defend
your life with your own hands at 30. Like everything in
life, being able handle sudden hardship is a skill. You
don't learn it by playing with your little toys, entertaining
yourself or getting fat. You get it by not being
complacent. By being ready and having experience.

When suffering is new to you, real, horrible deprivation,
you need an adjustment-period to get over the shock,
but real life, especially when it gets to be real and
unpleasant, does not give you one. It moves at it's own
pace and usually you do not get to prepare yourself
for the next awful thing, they just keep coming and
coming. It always gets worse.

10. Depression/panic
You do not deal well with change, especially of the
disaster sort. That's because your life is relatively stable.
You may worry about it coming, try to visualize it, but
you still can't see the reality because you have never
faced anything truly disastrous before. Those people
that you see on the 9/11 videos running from the
collapsing WTC towers know what I mean. To a certain
extent the ability to build and maintain a stable nation is
a good thing, except when that stability is damaged or
destroyed. The people in war-torn African nations would
have been able to handle 9/11 better. They know that life
involves, sudden horrible episodes, they know that no
period of peace ever lasts for long. The soft people who
take peace for granted, who go long stretches without
losing anybody they know, they are the ones who get
hysterical, who kill themselves when the bad life
happens.

Recipient: Cary Jeffries
Sender: Jim S.
Received On: 9/14/10
Subject: Not to be Blunt or Crude

Not To Be Blunt or Crude; But The Obama Administration's New Dick Washing Program

(CNSNews.com) – The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex.

The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA
>jQuery1284493150893="53" target="_blank">study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011. OK, 2009 to 2011. They figure it will take about two years to teach an African man how to wash his dick.

Recipient: Cary Jeffries
Sender: Wayne B.
Received On: 5/19/08
Subject: The Maid

The Maid

A Mexican maid asked for a pay increase. The wife was very upset about this and asked: 'Maria, why do you want a pay increase?'

Maria: 'Well Señora, there are three reasons why I want an increase. The first is that I iron better than you.'

Wife: 'Who said you iron better than me?'

Maria: 'Your husband said so.'

Wife: 'Oh.'

Maria: 'The second reason is that I am a better cook than you.'

Wife: 'Nonsense, who said you were a better cook than me?'

Maria: 'Your husband did.'

Wife: 'Oh.'

Maria: 'My third reason is that I am a better lover than you.'

Wife: (really furious now): 'Did my husband say that as well?'

Maria: 'No Señora, the gardener did.'

SHE GOT THE RAISE.

Damn Straight she did!

'Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh, son of a gun gonna have big fun on the Bayou' Hank Williams

Recipient: Cary Jeffries
Sender: Wayne B.
Received On: 3/28/08
Subject: Flag Pole ~ Gotta Love Smart Women & Engineers!

Bubba and Ray ( Minnesota civil engineers) were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking up.
A woman walked by and asked what they were doing.

We're supposed to find the height of the flagpole," said Bubba, "but we don't have a ladder."

The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a few bolts, and laid the pole down. Then she took a tape measure from her pocket, took a measurement, announced, "Eighteen feet, six inches," and walked away.

Ray shook his head and laughed. "Ain't that just like a woman! We ask for the height and she gives us the length!"

(Bubba and Junior are currently doing government work supervising the reconstruction of the I-35 Bridge.)

Recipient: Cary Jeffries
Sender: Wayne B.
Received On: 5/19/08
Subject: Environmentalists, You Gotta Love Them!!!

This is a GOOD one! Wayne

Ok folks if you do not want to get e-mails from me just let me know and I will remove you from my list, but I thought this was very funny after I got up off the floor from laughing so hard.

A woman from Austin, who was a tree hugger and an anti-hunter,

purchased several acres of Hill Country land, near Lake Travis, Texas.

There was a huge tree on one of the highest points in the tract. She wanted
to view the natural splendor of her land, so she climbed the tree.

As she neared the top, she encountered a spotted owl.

It attacked her! In her haste to escape, the woman slid down

the tree to the ground. The ensuing fall imbedded several splinters
of wood in her crotch.

In considerable pain, she hurried to the nearest doctor,
35 minutes away. She told him she was an
environmentalist and anti-hunter, and how she came
to receive all of the splinters. The doctor listened to her
story with great patience. He then told her to go into the
examining room and he would see if he could help. The
impatient patient sat, and waited for three hours before
the doctor reappeared.

The angry woman demanded, "What took you so long?"

He smiled and said, "Well, I had to get permits from US
Environmental Service, the Texas Parks and Wildlife,
and Keep Texas Beautiful before I could remove old-
growth timber from a recreational area. I'm sorry, but
they turned me down."

"God Bless Texas!"

Recipient: Cary Jeffries
Sender: Marc S.
Received On: 9/13/10
Subject; Video Link: Gunman Opens Fire in Traffic