From Reuters, courtesy of SHTF:
An 80-year-old Venezuelan woman died, possibly from trampling, in a scrum outside a state supermarket selling subsidized goods, the opposition and media said on Friday…
The opposition Democratic Unity coalition said Maria Aguirre died and another 75 people were injured – including five security officials – in chaotic scenes when National Guard troops sought to control a 5,000-strong crowd with teargas.
“Due to the shortage of food … the desperation is enormous,” local opposition politician Andres Camejo said, according to the coalition’s website. It published a photo of an elderly woman’s body lying inert on a concrete floor.
Camejo said thieves had also attacked the crowd, members of which were seeking to buy cheap food on offer at an outlet of the state’s Mercal supermarket chain in Barinas state.
El Universal newspaper reported that Aguirre was knocked to the ground during jostling in the crowd, while the pro-opposition El Nacional said she was crushed in a stampede.
Another person was killed and dozens detained following looting of supermarkets in Venezuela’s southeastern city of Ciudad Guayana earlier this month.
So you go to the grocery store, find a few pieces of food, use up your monthly fingerprint-checked purchase limit to buy it with what little money you have, only to exit the store to a mass of 5,000 thieves who intend to take it from you by force. That is a different world, where the social rules will get you killed, and only the violent survive.
Basically, this reality would mean that the thieves would likely be able to feed their families, but those who honestly purchased food would not. A world like that will change you. A world like that will change everyone. As everyone begins down that road, there is no telling where it can end.
I don’t pass judgment on that. Had my clan been tortured by them, I am not going to assume I know how I would react. Like everyone else I am cut of the same cloth – a bent sinner at heart. Had those been American servicemen burning, who knows what any of us would be capable of in retribution. I feel my amygdala light up just at those pictures, and those men are not even in my clan.
I put that all forth as an indication of how potentially dark the future may be. As SHTF points out, all of our economic/currency systems are socialist to some degree, all of our governments are bleeding future value out of the system to keep an unsustainable party going, and all of these systems are ultimately destined for the same fate.
We are heading for a global apocalypse unlike anything we could imagine, and we have all too many among us who will not leave us alone to survive on our own in peace, should we be so fortunate as to find a way to. They will try to get the government to take by force what we scrounge together, and reapportion it to them for fairness. Others will attack en masse and try to destroy us.
Given that, I expect that the darkness is unavoidable.
Apocalypse cometh™
The USA is brimming with small arms and ammo.
The single biggest question to me is, who will be first to in-group enough to organize full-scale non-government feudal estates?
The estates I envision would have to be resource rich (both food production and water resources, and the human capital to work them and defend them) which automatically excludes the low-IQ marauder bands already in place in the form of street gangs.
During the initial stages of this development a key attribute would be invisibility, because “early adopters” would be targeted by the white-blood-cell enforcers of the Old Political Regime. In this vein, it’s possible that early attempts will be destroyed, until the central system of order breaks down far enough to stop hounding the “citizens of order” on whom it once depended.
Gated communities will become walled micro-towns, and we’ll know something “new” has arisen when they begin to form their own systems of justice separate from the county, state or nation in which they are located.