{"id":18636,"date":"2013-02-06T08:48:42","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T13:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=18636"},"modified":"2013-02-06T08:48:42","modified_gmt":"2013-02-06T13:48:42","slug":"my-zombie-plan-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=18636","title":{"rendered":"My Zombie Plan, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

splash_zombies.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Recap from last time<\/a>: We’re living in a small cluster of houses, beside a farm, by a river. The sparse population means we won’t be getting mobbed by millions of city zeds. We’re just close enough to civilization to be able to drive to the city, forage, and return home before dark the same day. (Assuming it turns out such a thing is worthwhile.) This location also means we don’t need to build as much wall, since we’ll be protected on one side by water. In this rural setting, we’re probably using a septic tank and don’t need to dump our sewage in the river. <\/p>\n

We begin in late-ish summer (mid August) and begin working the farm, figuring out how things work, and preparing to harvest whatever they were growing here. <\/p>\n

So now we have a place to live and work to do. Let’s get down to the details of running this place…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Our Town<\/h3>\n

Zeds everywhere, food stores low, and our theater community is in a slump.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

This far out, we’ll be be using well water instead of city water. If we’re lucky, the well will have a hand-pump so we don’t have to haul water up from the river. If we’re unlucky, then we’re doubly unlucky, since river water would need to be boiled to be potable. We don’t know who is up river from us, and we don’t know what kind of dangers are in the water. (For example, runoff from a mass grave.) That, and river water itself isn’t usually the best drinking water. This boiling will consume firewood, which necessitates more gathering, which further strains our workforce. Finding and installing a hand-pump before winter would be a priority. <\/p>\n

Either way, we’ll have fresh water and a possible source of mild hydro power in the future if we want to explore the water wheel branch of the tech tree. We also have a place to fish. Fishing is a nice backup source of protein in case we don’t get enough meat from deer, and it’s probably a good productive activity for those who can’t quite keep up with the brutality of farm-work. <\/p>\n

At first I was worried about being so exposed to the road where raiders might find us. But now I’m thinking this is just an artifact of playing too many videogames. Sure, there will be criminals, and if you’re in a small group and you meet them on the open road then things might go badly for you. But criminals would have to be insane to assault a group of armed adults like this. If they kill us, then we’re no longer growing food and they’d have to run the farm themselves. But if they wanted a farm, they could just help themselves to one of the many empty farms without needing to assault a fortified location with an unknown number of armed adults. From their perspective, the assault couldn’t possibly be worth the risk. Such an attack would require several desperate, foolish, short-sighted, and depraved people to all wind up in a group together. (And be able to cooperate with each other.) <\/p>\n

I’ll admit it’s not impossible for us to be attacked by humans, but it’s not the most pressing or likely danger we’ll face, especially in the first year when there’s grain in the fields for the taking. The number of reasonable people should vastly outnumber the bloodthirsty nutjobs. Therefore, being visible is a good thing. If travelers come though we can trade and get news of the wide world. If we meet someone really useful (doctor, vet, mechanic, carpenter) we can perhaps persuade them to join us. Historically, being accessible by road is incredibly beneficial and being isolated is impoverishing. <\/p>\n

Having said that, we’re on a two-lane secondary road. (Which is where these sorts of villages show up. They don’t build these clusters around dirt roads or highways.) Would we really see that much traffic? It’s impossible to say. We’ve never had an apocalypse before and we don’t know what sort of travel patterns we’ll see among survivors. Maybe people will never come this way. <\/p>\n

Ideals<\/h3>\n

Everyone in favor of putting the crazy unhinged paranoid lady in charge raise your hand. Nobody? Thought so.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

We’re assuming I’m the leader, so the first thing we do is we stamp out any notion of this hardcore survivalist “cull the weak” from the Crawford-thinkers out there. Yeah, maybe if we kill off a couple of the weaker members we might improve the odds of survival of the rest of us. Too bad. I’m not interested in running a society built around human sacrifice, and in the end that mentality would do more harm than good. <\/p>\n

See, the only thing that makes one of us different from a pre-history hunter-gatherer is the knowledge between our ears. It took us many millennia to crawl out of that savagery, and we’re never more than a generation away from losing it. If one generation is incompetent enough to fail to pass things along, then we get to start over and hope it doesn’t take thousands of years to climb back. <\/p>\n

Which is the really damning thing about Crawford<\/a> in The Walking Dead, or indeed about any post apocalypse inhabitant who wants to kill human beings for short-term gain. If our knowledge is endangered, then we have a moral imperative to preserve as much as possible. That “cancer survivor” you think is so useless? She’s the only one who knows anything about sewing and she did some canning with her grandmother when she was little. The guy with the really bad eyesight? He’s one of the last piano players in the world, and he knows how to start a fire without modern tools. The old dude with the limp who’s deaf in one ear? He worked on septic tanks when he was 19 and still remembers some of the theory behind them. You need these people, and the knowledge they possess will save countless lives in the future.<\/strong> Not everything can be gleaned from libraries, and learning is time consuming even if the books are available. <\/p>\n

For one example of many: Jennifer Snow<\/a> has made it clear that she’s not<\/em> an athlete. She’s not an acrobatic college kid or a hulking muscle man. She’s probably exactly the sort of person Crawford would kill or kick out. But she left this comment<\/a> in the previous post:<\/p>\n

[…]it is not actually that difficult to preserve meat. You can make pemmican for one, where you a.) render out the fat (which takes a lot less wood than smoking the meat, also you don't have to use green wood and produce tons of smoke), b.) DRY the meat and pound it into a paste, then pour the fat over it. The plains Indians used to do this and store it in big buffalo-skin bags for use as travel rations so they only had to make kills every other week or so. A single pound of pemmican is about 3500 calories.<\/p>\n

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I suggest looking up various methods of charcuterie, which are coming back into vogue among foodies. That's how people used to preserve meat before refrigeration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If I had to choose between Walking Dead’s Molly the Zombie Slayer<\/em> or real-world Jennifer, I’d pick Jennifer in a heartbeat. You’ll be fighting zeds for the next several months, but you’re going to be fighting hunger and disease for the rest of your life. <\/p>\n

It’s not that I couldn’t go to the library and look up charcuterie<\/a>. It’s that I’ve never heard of it before. In a dictionary, you have to know how to spell the word before you can look it up. In reference books, you have to know that information exists before you can look for it. Jennifer’s knowledge – even if sketchy, incomplete, and not perfectly suited to our post-technology surroundings – is a working foundation on which to learn. Over time, Jennifer’s food preservation will save a lot more lives than Molly’s pickaxe. <\/p>\n

Everyone<\/strong> probably has a few nuggets of knowledge rolling around in their non-zombified head, and it’s all<\/strong> precious. Sewing, carpentry, auto repair, breadmaking, using a lathe, HVAC, every musical instrument, the historical framework required to establish a government that won’t sink to despotism, water treatment, fermentation, constructing a forge that’s capable of melting metal without killing everyone in the area, dentistry, glass blowing, nutrition, herbalism, the making of asprin and antibiotics, preserving food through pickling, bullet casing, locksmithing, hunting, animal calls, animal husbandry, eye care… <\/p>\n

It might not be obvious at first, but the day will likely come when someone will look at a lens grinding machine and lament that nobody can make eyeglasses anymore. Then suddenly Heretofore Useless Barbara will jump in saying she actually worked for an optometrist years ago and even though she didn’t personally use the machine she still remembers seeing it in action and she understands enough to intuit the rest.<\/p>\n

Even a complete know-nothing dummy can still stomp grapes, husk corn, pick cotton, churn milk, and carry water. Heck, even someone who is completely wheelchair bound should be able to knit, mend clothing, knead dough, sift grain, grind herbs, clean firearms, teach children, do bookkeeping, and a dozen other sitting-down jobs. That stuff needs to be done, and if they do it then others will be free to do the jobs that require legs. There’s no reason to throw people away as a matter of policy. <\/p>\n

The more knowledge you save and the more workers you have, the better your chances are at landing in the early industrial age instead of the Paleolithic one. Knitting might not help you kill zombies, but it will save a ton of lives once you’re facing old man winter instead of Zeds. Walkers are scary, but winter is an implacable son of a bitch who’s been murdering people for as long as Homo Sapiens have existed. <\/p>\n

This is to say nothing of the need for genetic diversity. If Crawford hadn’t fallen to the Zeds, they would have discovered the monumental difficulty of jump-starting a civilization with only a handful of fertile adults and a pre-technology infant mortality rate. <\/p>\n

And finally, there’s group cohesion to think about. I mentioned the importance of morale in my previous entry. If you make it clear that it’s okay to sacrifice others for survival, many people will take that lesson to heart and you’ll end up with a group of selfish cowards. They’ll fight and work harder if they can feel like this group is now their extended family. Not everyone will want that kind of close-knit team, but if you start throwing people away then nobody will want it. <\/p>\n

Everyone in the group will have friends and connections. If you sacrifice one person for the group, you’re also damaging the morale of everyone who valued them. Maybe Bob doesn’t pull his weight because he’s fat and not very bright. But if you get rid of him, then the people who liked him will tend to carry a grudge. “If the group wasn’t there for my friend, why should I go the extra mile for everyone else?” Turn away enough people and the place will enter a death-spiral of cruelty and self-interest. <\/p>\n

Yes, there are extreme conditions where the group really would benefit from the death of one exceptionally burdensome or useless person. The thing is, you don’t need to make an official<\/em> policy for this sort of thing. Everyone is already pre-programmed for brutal self-interest. Actively encouraging<\/em> that sort of behavior is just going to result in a society comprised of the people who are least able to cooperate. <\/p>\n

Even if the writers shove us into a contrived situation where only the ruthless can survive, I’d rather die doing the right thing than live with innocent blood on my hands. <\/p>\n

To be continued…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recap from last time: We’re living in a small cluster of houses, beside a farm, by a river. The sparse population means we won’t be getting mobbed by millions of city zeds. We’re just close enough to civilization to be able to drive to the city, forage, and return home before dark the same day. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[270],"class_list":["post-18636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-culture","tag-zombies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}