In the same way, much of what we understand about the way disease occurs is based on a linear projection. For example, if a person shows certain symptoms, say a high fever, and has joint and muscle pain and fatigue, maybe a cough, we can pretty well say that this situation will likely last about 14 days. We project those symptoms forward in time and recognize that we are looking at influenza. The natural course of that disease, by linear projection, leads to recovery in 7-14 days. We know we can decrease the severity of the effects by encouraging the person to keep warm, rest, and drink plenty of liquids, allowing the body to recover more readily – and then they should start feeling better in a few days. That is the natural course of influenza. It follows like a ball tossed through the air comes to ground in a predictable arc.
Suppose the person comes to their influenza symptoms terribly undernourished, perhaps even near starvation. That new piece of information changes the linear projection. There is a predictable arc to the outcome here, too. The malnutrition changes the trajectory of the disease. The positive outcome, recovery within 14 days, is no longer assured.
Human behavior, too, has predictable arcs for all manner of linear projections. History, like gravity, is one of our great teachers. Despite our deep-seated conviction that “it will be different this time,” it won’t be.
When the sun’s output changes, it affects mankind on a psychological and neurological level. In effect, a lot of people go bonkers. It isn’t just the unstable weather, or food shortages, or financial instability, or propaganda that sets it off. It is literally abnormal solar energies short-circuiting some people’s capacity for rational thought. Not all people, but enough people. Enough that an unaffected person will notice that it seems like folks are more touchy, aggressive, illogical, irritable, sad, and easily provoked. Compare the electromagnetic changes in the environment to someone nearby banging on a loud bell constantly – after a while, a person exposed to that just feels on edge.
The “on edge feeling” will manifest in different people in different ways. Intelligence, education, and income won’t make a bit of difference. It’s a biochemical and electromagnetic effect. Other people may feel energized by the changes: upbeat, focused, and directed. Hopefully, those people will aim their drives in a positive direction. It has happened in the past, EVERY TIME the sun’s output decreases. Poor decisions are made at the top. Empires fail. Nations fall. Forewarned is forearmed, because it is part of the Big Picture of the Cold Times.
Psychology of Living in a Different World
Psychologically, even those who are minimally affected by the changing solar output will experience a sense of rootlessness, anxiety, failure, and depression. This is normal at the end of empire cycles. Many familiar things will disappear from your life – say, for example, your favorite popular music. Music itself will change and become local and regional. People won’t stop making music. But if you prefer one vocalist, or a big band sound, or grand classical opera, there’s a chance you won’t have much access to that. Or it might be loss of the routine of a daily job and regular paycheck. It might be the loss of a familiar and favorite food or that morning coffee.
The loss of that familiar something might not hit you until an incident or sound or smell triggers a memory. Then, the loss will come crashing down on you. It may really knock you for a loop, bring you to tears, rekindle melancholic recollections, bring back faces of people who have vanished. This is a common reaction among people who have survived a great tragedy. It’s normal to experience this. Just pause whatever you are doing, remember those things, and the memory will move along and lose steam. It can’t hurt you. You’re in a different place, and making new memories now.
If you experience these effects, solider on. The loss and the sudden impact of it is not your fault. There wasn’t anything you could have done to prevent it. Nothing. Your job now is to preserve and protect and promote your people – that’s all.
Children are particularly sensitive to emotional or behavioral changes in their parents and siblings, and changes in their environment. This can make them moody or withdrawn. That’s normal, too. It’s a method of dealing with the adjustments. Not fun, but a normal response to traumatic experiences. Fortunately, kids are very resilient. Their world is already somewhat chaotic, since they don’t comprehend even the ordinary ups and downs.
Parental strength and consistency can go a long way toward creating stability in children’s lives. What you react to calmly, children will respond to calmly. If you panic or have an emotional episode, so will your kids. Tell them the truth, and don’t shield them from reality (“Daddy lost his job, so we’re going to have to cut back our spending;” “We’re going to turn our rabbits into dinner, and we’d like your help”). Involving children in daily tasks balances them and makes them feel useful and skilled. Hoeing the garden, feeding and watering livestock, helping around the house with daily chores – that’s what makes a child’s world feel safe and routine.
Children do not need to be shielded from ordinary reality. More often than not, adults who “shield” children are really trying to protect themselves. Discuss birth, death, and dying in a plain facts-of-life way….because it is.
Educating Children
Part of the process of moving from this era into the future is finding a way to educate our children in the concepts that are important to navigating both reality and our culture. Children absorb the essentials of family life and cultural norms nearly spontaneously, and require no direct verbal instruction (“teaching”) to internalize these basics – in the same way toddlers learn to walk and talk. In fact, children learn so quickly and so intently, that it’s virtually impossible to stop them from gathering data and making sense out of them.
Children’s innate curiosity drives them to understand whatever they have contact with, particularly those things their parents and other significant adults are interested in. One of the easiest ways a parent can trigger a child’s lifelong love of learning is to read. The child who sees a parent reading will seek to understand and imitate the parent’s focus. When you read to your child – and it doesn’t have to be boring “children’s books” – the child learns the same information you are learning. When a child sits in your lap and follows along as you read aloud, the child begins to mentally form the rules of the written word. Girls learn this more quickly and at a younger age than boys, but both assimilate the basics. Alphabet songs program the knowledge of letters, and a-e-i-o-u jingles teach writing rules.
With daily reading over time, often less than a year, a child can read efficiently enough to begin choosing his own books. Then you cannot derail the child’s ability to learn. It really is as simple as that. Once a child can read, they are able to be self-teachers, and will select from topics that interest them. Over the years, their interests will grow, with one subject leading to the next until they have a broad base of useable knowledge.
I know this to be true, in part, because that is how my own children were raised. Once they could read, there was no stopping them. A trip to the library was like finding buried treasure. After reading a book, they shared the information with the rest of us – thus, learning to summarize and speak extemporaneously – plus giving the rest of us interesting information. Both are accomplished, literate adults who continued into college studies; one has a master’s degree and the other is an independent filmmaker. Both still follow their interests and are widely read and well-informed and socially competent. A kid doesn’t have to be locked in a classroom with other kids the same age for 12 years to learn how to socially interact.
You don’t have to “teach” children in the way the current compulsory school system has trained us to believe. Merely provide the resources and get out of their way. Children read to understand concepts and develop new ideas, and also learn efficiently by doing: planting seeds, sautéing mushrooms, using a compass, building a barn. Innate curiosity and an inborn love of learning will carry them forward.
What? No hours a day
at a desk? No bells for the end of classes? No homework? That’s right. All of these are artifacts of the industrialization of education, effectively training youngsters to be compliant factory workers. The future doesn’t need obedient servants to the machine. It needs independent thinkers who are already ‘outside the box’.
The ancient classical form of education had three primary levels, the basic grammar, the middle level logic, and the higher level rhetoric. Grammar school is just like it sounds – learning the very most foundational ideas – say, the addition tables (2+2=4) – usually by rote. “Rote” means memorization, no more, no less. Addition tables lead to multiplication tables; the alphabet; “I” before “e” except after “c”; the difference between their, there, and they’re; how an apostrophe is used; spelling; critical dates in history - 1099, 1492, 1776. This is the age to memorize poetry, Bible verses, the Bill of Rights, Morse Code, another language or two, and anything else, because the child’s growing brain is uniquely set up to absorb by pure memorization.
All the memorization of grammar can be done while milking a goat or repairing a roof or taking a long drive into town. It doesn’t have to be done in a classroom. Sitting back leaning against an old apple tree is as fine a location for learning as any other. Recite the poem or verse or other material together as a family. Better yet, sing it. Set it to music and the child will remember it word-for-word into his old age.
The logic (dialectic) level is the point, usually around age 10-13, when the child takes all those memorized bits and finds that they actually apply to the physical world, interactions with others, and conceptualization of his or her way in life. That moment when a conversation brings up a memorized quote, or the laborious arithmetic tables suddenly makes sense while handling money. That’s when the brain takes a great leap. Now the foundation of grammar becomes a structure that logic can build upon.
From roughly age 14 onward, as grammar and logic intertwine, the rhetoric phase of learning is entered. We today think of the term “rhetoric” as referring to overly wordy largely meaningless statements (it is, sadly, what rhetoric has become). However, the significance of rhetoric in classical education is the ‘acquisition of the ability to speak coherently and persuasively’ – and, by implication, to think rationally based on the foundation of essential knowledge.
That is the point where the allusion to some shared grammar becomes shorthand for a larger issue. A reference to “The Lady of the Lake” (the mythical mystical woman who arose from a lake to give Camelot’s Arthur a sword that came with a heavy price) can be utilized as shorthand for “receiving a providential gift with strings attached”. Or when conveying the idea of a confusing situation, saying simply “Who’s on first?” – a reference to mid-20th century comedians Abbott and Costello’s routine about baseball player’s befuddling nick-names.
With classical education, learning actually does become a lifelong joy, continually building on a strong foundation throughout the years.
During the logic phase, the child who has a strong grammar foundation becomes ready to contribute to the community, even as he learns a practical skill. In the ancient world, youngsters were apprenticed to an expert in some field. As the child grew and observed the expert at work, the youngster acquired the skills of the profession….and, with that, an income for life. Generally, the child became not only a student but a worker. First, doing the basic cleanup and preparation for the expert, and later doing the expert’s work. Their labor paid for their education. The expert often became a surrogate parent and then a lifelong friend and mentor to the child.
There’s no reason why we cannot advance the apprenticeship model of education into the Cold Times. Children learn first at their parent’s knee, then in the family, and then out into their community. Their knowledge comes from memorization of key facts, learning to apply those facts to the real world, and then acquiring a useful skill. In this way, children are no longer an expensive burden to their parents, lingering as dependents in their parent’s homes well into their own third decade, as they do now.
Times are changing. The way children learn is the same as it has always been, but the way we impart knowledge, and what we impart, will be different by necessity. Think about it now, so it’s not a surprise when it happens.
Caring for the Elderly
One of the primary tenets of this book is that “everyone contributes”. This is important because daily life is going to be much more challenging in the Cold Times, and the Day of the Non-Contributor is rapidly passing into history.
Old folks who have worked and been useful their entire lives continue to desire usefulness, even in small ways. Grandma can string and snap beans, fold washed clothing, or even just set the table for supper. These are the little domestic chores that color and texture our lives. “Thank you,” is often a sufficient return for such contributions. Grandpa might change a light fixture, or set up a trust account, or hunt a deer from a blind, continuing the skills he already knows. Don’t discount the value of a lifetime of experience.
Elderly, as well as others, who are dependent on medication are going to die if things get bad enough. There’s no nice way to say that. Once they cannot get their medication, their days are numbered. They know this fact. Many old people will already have reconciled this reality, and are as prepared as someone can be. Allow them their dignity, and grant them the pleasures of their last days. Don’t critique their choices on what they put into their body (food, drink, or smoke, all small joys), and celebrate their life with memories.
Many modern elderly had no children or live distant from them. That means, they are dependent and alone. You may need one member of your group to be assigned to the task of monitoring and visiting the elderly, keeping them motivated to stay and contribute to the group, and preparing the community for the elder’s passing. Odds are good that many elderly who enter the Cold Times will not survive the first years of the Zen-slap phase, so the caregiver assignment transitions into another type of work over time.
Preventing Disease Transmission
Clearly, this one book cannot cover all possible situations or conditions (there are entire libraries devoted to this topic), but I will suggest some commonsense time-tested options. There are two primary methods of controlling disease. The first is to prevent it from occurring – by treating injuries right away and keeping immunity strong by a healthy diet and moderate exercise – and by avoiding contact with disease sources. We’ll look at these here.
The first step is to take care of any known health issues NOW. If you have nagging issues with your teeth, get them fixed as soon as possible – you don’t need to be faced with an abscess or bad tooth when things are falling apart around you. If you’re hooked on soda or junk food, stop – drink carbonated water and eat fresh whole fruit and nuts instead of processed junk. Make it a personal rule that if it went through a factory, it won’t be in your mouth – apples, oranges, melons, carrots, mixed nuts of all kinds, even freshly homemade popcorn are all great replacements. Your body will thank you.
The second step is to improve you physical health right now. You know if you are not fit enough to handle a challenging life. Be honest with yourself. A fitness goal that is achievable in a few months or less is to be able to walk four miles in two hours, that is, 30 minutes per mile. Many “normal” people can’t even cover a single mile in 30 minutes, which is an ordinary walking pace. That’s sad and says a lot about the condition of our people. Start where you are now, walk every-other-day (NOT daily – you have to allow your body recovery time) and work up to the full distance and speed.
Once you can cover 4 miles in 2 hours, speed up a little and aim to complete 5 miles in 2 hours. Make this an every-other-day hike, during which you can check out your property and make sure fences and livestock are well. That way, the exercise serves two purposes. Don’t be surprised if you lose weight and sleep better, too.
If you don’t already do so, start taking a good quality natural multivitamin supp
lement each day. You may also do well with mineral supplements including magnesium, calcium, selenium, potassium, zinc, and iodine. Do your homework on these supplements and be willing to spend the extra money to boost your health and that of your family.
Hygiene, that is, keeping a sanitary (NOT sterile) environment is the foundation of all the social health improvements over the last century. The great epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever were controlled largely by keeping human wastes out of the drinking water supply – simple and obvious in retrospect. Influenza and measles were slowed by having people stay home and away from crowds. Malaria was controlled by killing mosquitos that transmitted the disease. The very same measures still work today.
Clean Water and Outhouses
The methods for keeping your drinking water free of infectious agents was covered in the chapter on water – boil and/or filter your water, and draw it from an uncontaminated source. Unless you have a means to TEST your water, you won’t know if it is contaminated, so boil or filter drinking, cooking, dish-washing, and tooth-brushing water routinely (that is, any water that will go into your mouth).
Control of human wastes is not terribly complex, but it is not one of the most pleasant pastimes, either. The principles are straightforward: place your septic, outhouse, or latrine at least 100 feet from wellheads and rivers or streams, situated so there will be no drainage into your water supply.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 27