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Some news accounts from the great Four Corners manhunt
have mentioned that the area appears to be a hotbed of
survivalists
and constitutionalists.
As someone who has nothing against either survival (the first law of nature) or the U.S. Constitution (the supreme law of the land, which I have on several occasions taken an oath to support), I find these locutions curious.
Most of us, I suspect, fit into both categories. We
don't commit suicide and we respect the U.S. Constitution.
Yet survivalist
and constitionalist
have
become pejorative terms, applied to killers on the run, but
not to the mainstream folks who live next door.
Perhaps that's because the survivalists
you often
encounter in rural areas are victims of mythology.
The theory behind survivalism, as nearly as I can tell, is that the collapse of civilization is imminent, and so one should be prepared to manage without store-bought goods.
Given that, it amazes me that survivalists tend to retreat to the mountains and slick-rock deserts. By definition, there's not much water in a desert, and that can put a serious crimp in food production.
Up in the mountains, well, the growing season in
Leadville is all of 81 days. Gunnison lies half a mile
lower, but its season is only 52 days. Even in sunny
Salida, which boasts of sitting in the Banana Belt of
the Rockies,
the season is but 111 days, barely enough
to get a crop of pinto beans in a good year.
If you were seriously into that kind of survival, you'd settle on some bottom land in Logan County out on the Great Plains with a 180-day growing season, rather than a pine-ridged subalpine enclave or a distant canyon cleft.
The second fallacy in modern survivalism is the belief that one can manage without urban goods.
Note that even the Mountain Men of the 1820s and 30s either trekked to a summer rendezvous or journeyed annually to St. Louis for steel-jawed traps and gear for their possibles bag -- needles, bullet lead, flints, etc. They may have operated far from civilization, but they still needed it.
Observe that the Utes, Arapahoe and Cheyenne all
lived off the land.
Also observe that they eagerly
traded for rifles, gunpowder, iron fire-strikers, steel
arrowheads, metal pots and all manner of foofaraw. They
weren't fools -- they knew better tools when they saw them,
and those tools came from urban manufactories.
Or go check out some back to the land
habitation.
The cast-iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen -- where
did it come from? The saws, axes and mauls for preparing
the wood for combustion -- did they drop from the sky? The
lamps, and the kerosene to fuel them -- those evil cities
again, and Big Oil to boot.
Wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still tied to a city -- that is, civilization.
Which brings us to the third fallacy of modern survivalism, that if civilization begins to collapse, those self-sufficient back-to-the-landers will fare better than the swarms of urban proletarians.
History suggests that the opposite is the case. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the city of Rome was the last place to go. The folks out in the hinterlands suffered first, and suffered most, from the Goths and Vandals.
Closer in space and time, there are the ravages of our Civil War. Who fared worse -- a merchant in Savannah or New Orleans, or the hardscrabble farmer in the red clay of Georgia whose homestead was ransacked by Sherman's bummers?
Civilization nearly collapsed in Colorado shortly after it arrived. After the brutal Sand Creek Massacre in late 1864, the plains tribes retaliated in kind. They burnt Julesburg to the ground and attacked stage stations all along the South Platte Trail. Denver was cut off from the rest of the world.
But again, who fared worse? The Auraria washerwoman who had to pay dearly for a sack of flour, or the pioneer prairie farmer staked to the ground with a slow fire burning on his belly?
The theory that perilous times are better endured in rural areas than in teeming cities is simply false. While there may be a few exceptions, history shows that the odds of survival are much better in town.
Why is this so? My guess is that the people who have wealth and power -- that is, the people who direct armies and control markets -- operate in cities, and it's just human nature that they will run things to protect themselves.
The closer you live to the wealthy and powerful, the safer you are if civilization starts to collapse. Colorado survivalists who actually wanted to survive would flock to Cherry Hills and the Polo Club, not to remote compounds in South Park or isolated caverns near the Four Corners.
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