I’ve been taking part of my lunch hour at work to read for a little while. It helps me keep some sort of sanity with all the silliness in my job.

So I just finished reading Dies The Fire, the first book in the Emberverse Universe by S.M. Stirling. I won’t really talk “about it” in the sense of what the book is about.

It got me thinking… would I be able to do anything if this happened for real? I hope I wouldn’t die in the riots that most probably ensued after the Change, however, I don’t think I’m prepared for something like this.

For those who haven’t read any of the Emberverse books, these center in something that happened, some say it’s an electrical storm, some say it was aliens or god or whatnot… whatever, it ended up in leaving the human race with no electricity, no cars, no guns, nothing modern.

I think I would try to survive. I would learn new stuff. As probably some of you might now, I was sort of a girl scout some time ago. At least I know how to turn on one of those Coleman lanterns, and to “build” different furniture with logs tied up in different kinds of knots. I’m not afraid to rough it out. I do wonder how a shower would go, or whenever us girls get into “that time of the month” when we feel so yucky. But I guess we would just learn to deal with it some way or another.

However, how would we defend ourselves? These most recent generations are used to an “easy” life. Easy in the sense that we wouldn’t know what to do if we found ourselves in front of a Bear. How would we kill it? How would we get our food? Kill animals? Become Eaters (cannibals)? How would we defend ourselvse from those that are much stronger and much more capable?

There has always been evil people in the world. And definitely, the evilness in people will probably flourish even more in those trying times where there is nothing handed to us for some amount of money, where survival of the fittest is the norm.

What would YOU do if this happened right now?