I keep thinking about the book Into the Forest by Jean Hegland.

[chelaque liberal]

I just waited in line to buy gas in rural East TN and I kept thinking "This is surreal. It's really playing out."

I went on to the store and stocked up on beans, rice and flour-that's my mind set.

[redwitch]

1. I know what you mean

We need to remain calm though- I freak out way too easily anyway.

[ecoflame]

2. Me too

I read James Kunstler's book, 'The Long Emergency' - okay, now that really freaked me out.

I just got ahold of the 'Into the Forest' today. Had to finish 'The Constant Gardener' first.

[newswolf56]

3. Stocked up on rice, lintels, beans and coffee on Sunday. Also...

toilet paper. I doubt it will get Into the Forest bad -- more like something out of Dickens (complete with millions homeless and starving to death, not just in the Katerina region but throughout the nation), with the end not the total collapse forseen by Hegland but rather the permanent reduction of the United States to a Third World economy: a tiny, ever-more-obscenely rich oligarchy savagely tyrannizing a huge, ever-more-impoverished, ever-more-desperate proletariat. With no recovery possible because the oligarchy will never again allow any alternative to the capitalist New World Order.

Desperately wish I still lived in the country. My survival skills are strictly rural/agrarian: vegetable gardening, fishing, hunting, even trapping if it became necessary -- all totally useless in a city, especially a city like Tacoma, where capitalism in the form of ASARCO has left the soil so toxic any foods grown thereon are deadly poison.