We live in an unpredictable time. Last week, I could not have predicted the top three news stories of the week.
I could not have predicted what I saw in court this week with a group of warriors. I could not have predicted the things I witnessed today as I just walked through my day.
This much I know — I like being among good people. Whether there is anything in it for me or not, I still like being among good people.
I don’t know if I will ever need a helping hand from the other group members, and I do not know that I am guaranteed to get it just because I have invested in the group. But I know this much — a friend is more likely to receive your answer to a call for help than a stranger.
Case in point, how many times in an hour walk through San Francisco do I see a stranger in need?
100?
Possibly 500?
Maybe even 1,000?
And if a friend who I waded through the hard times alongside — one of the dozens who come regularly through these parts. How would that be different?
Would they not get the shirt off my back?
You know it is very different. It is not the same seeing a friend in need or a stranger in need.
And why?
Is the stranger less human? Of course not.
Friends are just more familiar. They are in community with me. They are people who
I have had experiences with, who I feel an affinity for, and even an allegiance to.
So the question of being with such people for a few hours is a no-brainer to me. I just really, really enjoy being with people like that.
But there’s something that escapes many living in 2023. There’s something that escapes many living in the city and suburbs. There’s something that escapes many even living in rural areas.
To preface that, you of course don’t make friends during the good times because you want to take advantage of them during the bad times. That would be manipulative. You make friends because you enjoy their company.
But this is the part that is lost on so many people today: if you don’t make friends during the good times, you will be alone during the bad times. You will be at the mercy of strangers, to whom you are just another of the hundreds or even thousands of beggars an hour that a person may see.
You do not bond during the good times friends for that purpose. But if you do not bond during the good times, you loose that benefit.
City dwellers, suburb dwellers, and rural dwellers alike get a lot of a specific delusion fed to them.
We are told there are systems and services and apps and YouTube videos and life hacks for everything we could possibly need. Our era is full of that delusion. It wants us to believe that our face to face, one on one, relationships are replaceable.
You could call it an extension of rugged American individualism, but a really creepy version. Because rugged American individualism isn’t about isolating the self. It involves a whole lot of community.
The modern take on it, we are assured, is basically this. Please forgive my rough translation: “I don’t need my friend Johan or my brother or my Pastor or my neighbor, as long as I have Bill Gates’s latest startup, Klaus Schwab’s latest solution, or Tony Fauci’s latest program.”
What could go wrong?
That’s a totally detached way of seeing the world.
So this is what I do, and this is what I realize, since some of the painful fallout of Covid opened my eyes to it — I get people together regularly and there’s really no agenda to it rather than to show up and be together and share some adventures and experiences — just like a bunch of old friends sitting around a barrel of lager or a campfire or a pot of some delicious home cooked meal just chewing the fat.
Only the conversations we are having are conversations that are probably going to keep us out of jail, stop us from being treated like someone’s property, and that encourage us to do better.
The way people like us end up chewing the fat can be pretty intense but also really fun and really fulfilling.
And there’s more.
There’s this thing that we know. We know that in a world where everyone seems to want to convince you that you don’t need anyone, there’s a chance that when they are needed, that someone like that will show up for you.
No guarantees.
But there’s a chance.
And I’d sure prefer to have some of the warriors from my post-Covid days there at my side when I’m in dire straits, than some of the misguided folks from my pre-Covid days.
So we meet. We meet even when a jackboot might not be pressing on our neck. We meet even when someone might not be holding us down to jab us. We meet just to be together.
For one, because it’s probably better company than a lot of other things that we could be doing.
And for two, because if dark days ever return, these are probably the kinds of relationships you will have wanted to build.
I don’t know what happens to the rest of the people around us, but I know that there is likely to be a core of people in enclaves and communities all across the continent who will continue onward with the core concepts of American culture that worked, dispensing with those that didn’t work. Perhaps America is revived, perhaps those colonies of American culture are all that are left.
I don’t know exactly what that looks like. But I suspect many of us who put in the time together in the good times will one day find ourselves grateful that we did exactly that.
Allan Stevo is the bestselling author of “Face Masks in One Lesson” and “Face Masks Hurt Kids.”
I am working to get to know my neighbors for exactly that reason--that someone will help me if I am needed.
ALSO to have opportunities to help others. While pondering this email, I imagined myself on my deathbed from radiation sickness (or anything else), talking to a neighbor. I would want him to know where my survival supplies were so he could grab them and the work I did to stash them up would help a worthwhile survivor and thus mean something.
I spend some time thinking about what to do for the clueless when they're ravenously hungry post-collapse and zero preps. I would not dare GIVE them anything--I can't feed them long and no way feed my whole state--or even the whole block. What labor could they do in exchange for a can of food, that would actually be worth it to them and to me in horrendous conditions?