I started outlining a book once. I guess it followed the same pattern as most apocalyptic story’s; world blows up, the hero (a prepper) moves from modest surroundings to champion ‘his people’ through a recovery and everyone lives happily ever after in the brave new world.
My book offered something no other story had though: a completely incompetent author with terrible writing skills.
Now, despite having all of this going for me, one of the early challenges I had to have my characters address was the uncertainty of determining just when Zero Hour would occur. How would he know when the trigger was to be pulled and the fuses lit? How would he know when to hop in the truck and go?
I mean obviously he (or we) would know after the fact when the optimum time to begin executing plans should have been. Beginning to soon, especially if your plans have elements of bravado (such as storming a Walmart for canned goods and ammo) means that you’d end up in jail for a very long time if the crises does not fully materialize. Starting to late would mean that everyone in Bumfuck beat you to the goods you were counting on.
So how do you know when/if the SHTF moment is here and it’s time to start doing lion shit? This question is not rhetorical. Let me frame the same question a little differently: Does the corona virus have the potential to cause irrational responses in our communities and can those responses be disastrous enough to crash the economy/society. Can COVID-19 usher in a world wide collapse?
Before today I would have thought not. Today I found that Bernie and Biden, enabled by panicked voices across the spectrum of media organization, are doing their best to scare the holy shit out of our citizenry.
Sanders warned the coronavirus pandemic could cause deaths on par with a major war, in an address slamming Donald Trump and calling for an aggressive response by congress.
“In terms of potential deaths and in terms of the economic impact on our economy the crisis we face from the coronavirus is on a scale of a major war and we must act accordingly,”
Both CNN and MSMBC are pumping fear into the atmosphere as fast as the wide eyed hosts can manage. If there is a way to crash the country, these guys will find it.
All of this brings us back to the original question. How do you know when?