libertybelle diaries

Many people understandably express concern about the worsening economic situation and wonder how bad things will get. I don’t have a crystal ball to consult, but all the economic indicators are trending poorly. The economic situation isn’t really what this blog post is going to be about. I recently started giving people a head’s up what my blog posts are going to be about in the beginning, so they can easily decide to skip reading further or venture on. So, this blog post is going to be about buying into rumors and bad news that fits your personal views on politics, world events, the worsening economic situation. Yes, this is another warning about information and news sources.

Almost daily now there’s more bad news on the economic front, from projected wheat shortages, rice shortages, drought in the US Mid-West, more shipping problems, war and the list goes on and on. We could have hyperinflation and major economic collapses, but let’s look at some Great Depression facts.

Most of us have heard stories of hardship and struggle from old people who grew up during the Great Depression (1929-1933). Loads of novels and movies have been set during that time period too. However, some interesting facts about The Great Depression get lost, because it’s easier to focus on people going hungry, soup kitchens, bared down recipes to struggle by on, and widespread unemployment – all things that happened.

Unemployment in the US rose to 25% during the Great Depression. The US is below 4% unemployment presently, but inflation is rising rapidly.

What’s interesting is that despite the economic crisis, plenty of very successful businesses, like Publix Super Markets and Pendleton Grain Growers started during the Great Depression. The same thing will likely happen during our current economic woes, even if it gets much worse.

With the fertilizer situation, this year many farmers might not plant as much, but I’d expect a big opportunity for organic and plain old manure-based fertilizers to develop quickly. Big agri-business might not adapt rapidly, but plenty of smaller farmers, might see opportunity in this situation. Along with all the hardships and bad things, this current economic crisis will also fuel some new, successful businesses, new opportunities and a lot of innovation as Americans figure out ways to survive and thrive, because that’s what Americans do.

We are still a country with plenty of people who seek opportunity. Millions of people from other countries still flock to America for that very reason. America remains a country with vast material resources. Beyond that, we still remain a country of incalculable human resources and potential. No matter what bad things happen, I believe it’s important to keep this in mind.

With all the economic bad news and worries, a lot of people rush into believing any conspiracy theory that gets passed around online, with no real evidence that events are even connected. For instance, five days ago, the headquarters of Azure Standard, a popular distributor of organic and health food, used and promoted by many YouTube homesteading and prepper channels, burned down. Within hours there were people on YouTube and other social media running wild with a conspiracy theory linking the Azure Standard fire to other food company fires. It was all innuendo about “a lot of fires with food places happening” and rumors run amok.

It seems there are lots of people who want to buy into grand conspiracy theories without any evidence or waiting for an investigation.

That happens a lot online.

If you’re watching a video or TV personality or reading information and it gets you feeling panic or alarm, chances are it’s deliberate, politically-motivated agitation propaganda or clickbait to get people watching or reading or someone reacting out of fear. I’ve read Gavin DeBecker’s, book The Gift of Fear, like millions of other people, and fear or gut instincts can be important to listen to, but when you’re making long-term plans, I still believe it’s wiser to calmly make big spending decisions, plan a budget, and make important financial decisions. In economic crises, being on as stable of personal financial ground as possible improves your chances of faring better than being in a lot of debt and having no money saved.

Along with slowing down on reacting to news, it’s important to slow down about jumping to conclusions about things we see around us too. Ask questions and take your time before getting worked up or rushing to assume the worst.

Ask five eyewitnesses to an event what happened and it’s likely you’ll get five different versions of events. That’s why I’m actively putting the brakes on reacting to alarming news, because many people keep assuming the worst possible economic calamities will befall us. I also am trying not to buy into the “OMG” type social media reactions, where people rush to talk about this “crisis” or that “crisis,” or as in the case of the Azure Standard fire, connect other fires within the food chain as part of some grand conspiracy without a shred of evidence to connect these events or even time for investigators to determine the cause of the Azure Standard fire.

Under-consumption was a problem in the Great Depression, because people couldn’t afford to buy things. Under-consumption also led to massive job losses, as businesses folded.

Mass panic led to bank runs, which forced bank to liquidate loans, which in turn led to bank failures. About 9,000 banks failed between 1930 to 1933.

Mass panic exacerbates and even creates many of the dire events that happen in crises. And mass panic is fueled by rumors, media hysteria and people buying into reacting out of fear. That’s why I keep mentioning it’s important to be calm and try to think through situations, rather than get on a soapbox every day with “the sky is falling” opining.

I don’t have a plan for all the worst-case what-ifs in my life, let alone worrying about what everyone else is going to do, but I do know that getting worked up has never helped anyone make sound decisions, become better prepared, or handle any crisis better. I’ve dealt with lots of crises in my life, just like most people. I’ve had two types of cancer and am thankful to be alive. During that journey, I determined not to let fear control my life. Since then, I look at each day as a bonus and try to be grateful for every moment I am alive. Each crisis you weather makes you a little bit stronger to weather the next one.

You don’t need to solve all the problems of a crisis before the crisis impacts, just try to position yourself to be a little bit better prepared and able to manage than the day before. Set some goals and then each day tackle a little bit more.

Of course, the worst case might happen. People who run around in a panic will probably fare worse in every situation and that goes for developing sound situational awareness, making good decisions, and reacting in ways that will help them or their loved ones survive, especially in the worst case.

Keeping a positive attitude and trying to quell anxiety and fear are as important preparedness skills to work on as stockpiling food, I think. During the pandemic, I saw a lot of Covid hysterics, who inflicted a lot of unnecessary fear and anxiety on their kids and I see signs of that happening with some people concerned about the economic crises unfolding now. There is no need to fill your kids with anxiety and worries every day about shortages. Sure, just like with Covid, it was important to talk to kids about what was happening, but there was no need to allow Covid to consume their daily lives, which many people did.

Interestingly, at the link I mentioned of successful businesses started during the Great Depression, at the beginning of this post, Yellow Book USA, was on that list and introduced yellow pages to help customers compare prices. People had to think about purchases and often had to wait to pull together enough money for basic purchases and compare prices.

My late mother was a child during the Great Depression. She said they didn’t wear shoes in the summertime and got new shoes when school started in the fall. She also said she worked picking potatoes and other vegetables for some nearby farm and handed her pay to her parents, who pooled all the family’s resources including money she, her sister and brothers earned, to buy necessities. She said they had to work as a family to get by.

Mass panic is very contagious and it likely spreads faster than Covid, but luckily we all have the ability to prevent it from taking hold in our lives. I’d hate to see a whole other segment of society go off the deep-end about economic crises, like the segment that went bonkers with fear about Covid.

We have the power to control fear.

Lecturing or trying to scare people into emergency preparedness (or anything else, for that matter) doesn’t really motivate people to make long-term changes. A few people might get alarmed, jump into action, and go out and buy some prepper supplies, but I suspect most of those people might do some shopping, then say they “prepped” and are done or lose interest.

On the bright side, there are lots of people who are well-prepared, who have experience gardening, canning, know how to improvise, know how to make food stretch, etc. and these people could easily become beacons of hope and leaders within their own families, circle of friends, and community in a crisis.

Many of these people are already online, in the homesteading and prepper communities, or you can go on Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube and there are still plenty of cooking, gardening and preparedness blogs & sites around. Just type into a search engine what you want to learn and you’ll find loads of useful information, tips, advice and many excellent how-to (step-by-step) videos, blog posts, articles, etc. I’m constantly learning new things and better ways to make things, grow things, stock up, store things, and organize by watching videos, reading information online and in books – even in some of my old cookbooks.

In the past week or so, I’ve come across several videos I want to share in this blog post. First, I recently came across this homestead channel, The Hollar Homestead, that I had never seen before. In the video the man was fabricating his own contraption to pull logs and his making stuff with junk appealed to my “trash to treasure” nature. I watched some of their other videos. Here’s one I’d like to share:

I believe everyone should be learning new skills and stocking up on food and basic supplies and working to become better prepared for emergencies. I’ve always believed that. I also believe working hard to get your personal finances in order, cut expenses and eliminate as much personal debt are not only important preparedness tasks, but can relieve a lot of stress in your life and open the door to opportunity. Dave Ramsey’s approach to getting out of debt works and while I didn’t follow it to the letter, I did stick pretty close to it to pay off all my personal debt, put money in savings and pay off my house. I read his Financial Peace book many years ago, when I found it at a yard sale, but it took me many years to really get serious about eliminating personal debt and I’m still working to change my spending habits and develop better saving/frugal-living habits.

For a glimmer of hope on building community, here’s a video by a nice lady, Jess, at Roots and Refuge Farm. I’ve enjoyed her gardening videos over the past few years:

A lot of videos are lists and I saw this list video yesterday at Homestead Corner and agree with this lady’s 10 things, although I haven’t invested in precious metals and probably won’t (just a personal view). I want to mention though that in many countries with currency instability, people invest their money in items that have value, which they can use to trade or pay for items. That approach of owning things with intrinsic value, besides piles of money, that may become worthless in a currency crisis, has merit. I just have always had a lot of faith in the US dollar, but these days not nearly as much as I used to. I still cling to hope America is not Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Russia. In Russia it’s common for people to invest their money in items of value they can trade when there’s a currency crisis. Here’s her video:

Instead of getting angry or upset with people who aren’t preparing for emergencies or doing it how I think they should, I’m trying to stay positive each day.

An economic collapse inflicts long-term pain and the actual situations people face can change over time, but it can also vary regionally and especially differing impacts on rural people vs. urban dwellers. There isn’t any perfect preparedness plan, because there assuredly will be all sorts of other emergencies and crises that could (and likely would) impact us, beyond food shortages. If you’re a “what if” type person like me, the alarming scenarios that cross your mind can make you want to bury your head under your pillow and that’s definitely not a good way to prepare or face adversities.

To buckle down for the long-haul takes a long-term approach – not rushing around in a panic, trying to buy this or buy that every day, in hopes of beating the panic-buying or collapse many people predict is coming soon. People who try to do too many things at once, out of fear, often burn themselves out quickly (and make a lot of poor decisions). It’s important to pace yourself for the long-haul. And yes, both panic-buying, which could clear out grocery store shelves quickly and an economic collapse are very real possibilities in the very near future.

Before 2020, lockdowns and massive civil unrest didn’t seem probable to me, but since then I’ve worked continuously on stocking up more, trying to learn new skills, plus brush up on old ones. During that Covid craziness of 2020, I focused on having all the things I needed for my husband’s care while he was on home hospice care and it was much harder for me to get out to the store. I had to arrange for one of my sons to be here with my husband, to go anywhere, so I made lists and did a lot of shopping online.

Now, we’re facing worsening financial chaos and I’m prepping for one person, but I think about my kids, grandkids, other family and friends when I’m stocking up on food and supplies. I am sure they likely have items or skills that I lack and will help me too, even though some of them aren’t stocking up on as much food as I think is prudent.

It’s important to not only work to figure out ways to boost your survivability chances in an emergency, but to preserve as much of your quality of life as possible too. We should all want to strive for long-term sustainability, not just focus on crisis-planning everyday.

There have been people mentioning their grocery stores being out of saltine crackers and I noticed that a few times where I live, so I printed out several homemade cracker recipes and they’re going into a three-ring binder I started for recipes and information I print out or write down. In case the internet goes down in an emergency, I want to have paper copies of stuff, so the binder was an easy, cheap solution. Here’s Miss Lori, a wonder of down-home cooking, at Whippoorwill Holler, with a homemade cracker video:

I absolutely love Miss Lori’s YouTube channel and have been watching a long time. She makes me feel like I’m sitting right there in her cozy kitchen watching her cook.

All across America, and beyond, there are good and kind people, many of them online, sharing ideas, finding solutions to problems and offering up heaps of good cheer… and good cooking too.

I posted a YouTube video by a nice prepper lady, AlaskaGranny, who I’ve watched for a couple years. She mentioned active listening and that’s going to be sort of a stepping off point for this blog post.

I have lots of opinions – many of them about politics, foreign policy and the culture war stuff going on in America, but none of that stuff really matters when it comes to if there’s an emergency situation. What’s going to matter is taking care of my family, friends, neighbors and the people around me in my community and I think that’s how it is for most people.

Often in YouTube communities, regardless which community, there’s a lot of copycat stuff or a topic that one person does that gets a lot of attention, then other YouTubers in that community will jump on the bandwagon and do a video about the same thing. I’ve seen this happen in crafting and needlework communities too, not just preppers and homesteaders. I suppose it’s just human nature and how trends work.

Some common themes I’ve heard mentioned on prepper channels are Argentina’s collapse, Venezuela’s lawlessness, planning for marauding bands of thieves, and warnings about how dangerous the unprepared, starving people will be. None of these outcomes is preordained if America has some major economic turmoil, serious shortages or other financial upheavals.

No one (especially the Russians) was expecting the Ukrainians to put up this much of a fight when Russia launched a full-scale invasion over a month ago. Zelensky was not a popular leader at home and no one ever expected him to rise to the occasion like he has. That’s the thing, people can often surprise you and all these experts or studies saying “this group of people will behave this way or that way during a crisis,” often don’t turn out that way.

I’ve read interesting accounts about WWII Londoners and how they survived the German bombing raids, which started in the fall of 1940 and didn’t ease up until May of 1941. Sebastian Junger, in his book, Tribe, explained how British experts and authorities expected mass hysteria in the run-up to the German aerial bombardment. The Churchill government expected economic production to plummet and people to fall apart

Exactly the opposite happened. Junger writes, “Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis. Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdowns in England, ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals saw admissions go down.”(p. 47) He explains that psychiatrists were puzzled as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the intense air raids. Junger mentions one doctor during the Blitz commented that chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances. (p. 48).

Junger goes on, “Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940.”(p. 48)

Many ordinary Londoners during the Blitz went to work during the day, trudged to the bomb shelters at night, then emerged in the morning and headed back to work. All sorts of people with no training self-organized and worked to help clear rubble, assist the wounded, and help in whatever way they could. I’ve read numerous books on the French Resistance and they’re filled with stories of unlikely heroism by ordinary French citizens, many of them women.

Here’s something else I’ve been thinking about and that’s how we often expect other people to view things the same way we do and to take the same actions we’re taking This goes from lifestyle choices, child-rearing (oh, boy do people have strong opinions on that topic), how to manage money, and it goes on and on. In the past two years there’s even definite strong opinions on how we should interact in public since Covid arrived.

It’s hard sometimes not to be alarmed if you follow the news or gravitate to social media content that incites, inflames, or that’s fearmongering for clicks, or listen to people all worked up or angry at some particular type of person or groups of people constantly.

The whole point of emergency preparedness is not just so you can survive a crisis, but also so that you can preserve your quality of life as much as possible. British people during those WWII air raids were still having their tea – even in the air raid shelters and then going to work the next day. They did laundry, cooked meals, took care of their children and all the other normal tasks of living. The same is happening in Ukraine right now. There are even farmers still trying to plant their crops, families caring for their children and elderly family members, doctors and nurses caring for the sick, truck drivers showing up for work, and the list goes on.

Something I’ve been thinking about is, while severe shortages do sound very alarming and could cause a whole lot of disruptions and hardships, America is a very large country with vast natural and human resources. We are a country with a great deal of creative energy and innovators. I suspect that rather than sit around and starve or wait for Washington to figure something out, there will be plenty of Americans, who will jump into action and start creating their own small-scale systems to manage, if the global and national systems fail to meet the challenge.

During several floods, I’ve seen news stories of men coming with their own boats and launching rescue operations to help emergency officials. I’ve seen civilians get in their own vehicles and head to the next town or county to help out in an emergency situation. It’s very common for concerned citizens to join in search efforts when there’s a missing child or travel to assist other firefighters.

While it’s easy to see a lot of disturbing online social media behaviors, there’s also a wealth of goodwill and charity too, especially during emergencies. I’ve seen fundraisers set-up within online communities. A year or so ago a YouTube homesteader family was in a terrible car accident. The man died and his wife was seriously injured. Other online homesteaders immediately started raising money to help that family. I’ve seen people on Twitter and facebook do the same thing.

People often spontaneously organize and figure out solutions, especially in a crisis. And the thing is these types of local leaders and community action don’t come from policy experts, local government, and certainly not from Washington politicians. They come from ordinary people, who got concerned about a problem and decided to take action.

It’s amazing how quickly goodwill and charity can spread and there’s still an abundance of that in America, no matter what other shortages we might face. Volunteerism and civic action in crises really are part of the American DNA and that’s why I remain hopeful for our future.