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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

Best way to prep is strong community connections around you. Community is resiliency.

Just be aware that what looks like a strong community can quickly turn into something else once the sh* hits the fan...

Practice makes perfect. Highly recommend finding your local food not bombs cohort or visiting one in a nearby city and then starting your own back home.

Community resiliency is a natural instinct it seems. Rebecca solnit's "paradise built in hell" is a fascinating read on the subject.

Now I’ve volunteered with a local FNB group so I’m not trying to be mean but…

What would a group that gets cheap and or throwaway groceries and feeds homeless do in a Fit-Hits-The-Shan or End-of-World scenario?

You’d have to hope some heavily agricultural minded types would be friendly to you and your labor potential.

The "end of the world" could be a local phenomenon. I like my headcanon that in Mad Max it's just Australia that's fucked, the rest of the world is fine.

If there are functional societies elsewhere in the world, then help in the form of food could be on its way. The question is, will it be distributed efficiently to the people who need it? Something like Food Not Bombs could respond quite effectively to such a situation.

I'm not sure if you've read some of FNB's materials they set out at those events, but they should have reading out that defines the mission clearly as one not of charity, but of teaching people to be interdependent within their communities rather than on central governments. FNB is above all else a peaceful anarchist resistance movement.

Primarily volunteering with them creates two things that are basically the most important things in any emergency:

1. Knowledge of who to talk to and where to go when shit hits the fan

2. Established practices of organization

If community resources are scarce, and you have a FNB cohort in the community, you have a group of people with lots of practice stretching out food, preparing it, and redistributing it to many people. Again I recommend solnit, she wrote about this exact thing happening in one of SF's earliest devastating earthquakes.

The other upside is when the State turns up to fuck your community efforts up (like they did in SF, or Louisiana after Katrina) you also have a group with established methods of peaceful resistance. They probably already have clout with the local State enforcement group: the SFPD have gotten to the point where it's basically impossible to get them to harass FNB because of years of softening individual officers to the cause.

Edit: I see now you mean, practically speaking, what actions could they take.

Well in a place like NYC I have no idea. Probably there would be huge issues with famine. Realistically the first thing everyone should do is get the fuck out of that city lmao.

I don't know if SF would be so bad. There's also groups like Food Not Lawns trying to get people into growing their own food. If their efforts continue to be successful we can have closer to home food supply chains. As for convincing people to share, for some reason that isn't all that hard. When capitalism and its disincentives fall away, it seems people revert to our basic evolutionary advantage of social bonding and organization.

Not to mention all the dry goods stashed in stores throughout the city can be stretched pretty far by the people who have practice at it. If FNB minded folks can redistribute from the stores quickly enough they might even be able to get to the meat and etc to turn into jerky etc - hopefully they'd abandon veganism in an actual emergency. Knowing them, probably not lol. But if I'm there that's what I'm doing.

Others have written on the plight of cities in anarchy, and I don't think it's quite so doom and gloom. "Conquest of Bread" was the OG and I think it still holds up.

FWIW, this is light years away from the impression that Food Not Bombs people and activism has left on me over a couple decades of occasional, incidental contact.

That's a shame. I'd be curious generally which area they're in and how they're different over there, I'd want to go and chat and see what's up.

My most recent experiences were not recent, to be fair.

But the locations were primarily Boston and San Francisco.

LOL we saw how that played out with COVID. 1/2 your "community" is going to deny the disaster and deliberately worsen it. 1/2 (with some overlap) is going to go from grocery store to grocery store buying all the necessities to resell them later.

EDIT: Wow, I know HN wears rose-colored glasses when looking at the past, but come on, people. We didn't hallucinate the antimaskers, antivaxxers, and thousands of protestors deliberately ignoring stay-at-home. I worked with a health official who had her home picketed because she dared to involve herself in health policy. It's only been a few years and y'all are in denial already.

That was actually more of a demonstration of the utter lack of community in our society, among other things.

that's the parents point though

That's the point. In many respects, community life is just a polite facade.

I think both sides of this thread agree that most of us (in the US at least) don’t have a robust community in the “community resilience” sense.

The only disagreement I think is in the definition of community. We could either say that community is just, like, our extended circle of acquaintances; we’ve all got one and it isn’t very robust against disasters. Or we could say that a resilient community is some deeper thing on which people can lean in a disaster, but which needs to be carefully tended to, and most of us lack.

The latter is, I think, what the original poster meant.

Yes, that was what I was going for. If you consider your community to be only the likeminded, cooperative people you know and associate with and rely on for help, then of course "your community" is great. I was talking about the greater community: the full population of your town, neighborhood and/or surrounding neighborhoods, and I'd estimate (depending on where in the country) a good 50% showed their counterproductive, selfish, belligerent side during COVID. Since we collectively haven't learned anything from our mistakes, I would expect the same behavior during the next disaster.

I think it is not just a matter of what you consider your community. The comment was suggesting building that community of reliable and likeminded people. It takes work, it is part of the “prep.” I certainly haven’t done it. But of course the suggestion must be to build the good type of community.

I see. I thought you were refuting the advice that having community is a major factor in resiliency - you were actually saying, "lol good luck having community in the modern world." Which... yeah : /

I didn't have either of those issues in my community, I'm sorry yours had those issues. In ours we formed bubbles, shared food, cooked meals together, and played an absolutely stunning volume of retro multiplayer games. Covid was awful but I think I'll always fondly remember some of those nights.

In a real disaster, there won’t be any buying or selling

Maybe that is what you get when you replace social obligation with money and apps. That kind of existence was common in America and increased during covid. And it is a terrible model for situations where people actually need each other in a reciprocal way.

I don't know about you, but my community came together in those moments. When TP was hard to buy, we shared among ourselves. When members in our community discovered they had issues that prevented them from taking the vaccine safely, we went back to masking when meeting to keep them safe. And so on and so on.

I think maybe you're thinking of a different definition of "community connections" than the parent poster. It's not _literally everyone around you,_ but the people around you that you trust and support and who will support you. Get as many of those as you can, as high quality as you can.

It's beneficial even if the world _doesn't_ go to shit, too! =)

this

I lived in a small condo complex during the early pandemic (~30 units, around 100 people total including kids) and COVID brought everyone together -- people sharing food/supplies (even elusive toilet paper), offering to make grocery runs for those that can't go themselves, one lady sewed enough homemade masks for everyone using her curtains.

I'd rarely met the neighbors before then, but COVID really brought everyone together.

Though I lived in a pretty liberal and well educated area, not many anti-vaxxers around where I lived.

I don't think anyone's denying that American society doesn't create strong communities, I think they are advocating to work towards creating one around you.

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