10 Survival Skills Your Grandparents Knew

 

Poor Man Survival

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ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 

 

10 Survival Skills Your Grandparents Knew

Our modern society is highly dependent upon we’ll call the “system.” Not only do we rely upon utility services to bring us electricity, water and natural gas, but also on an incredibly complex supply chain which provides us with everything from food to computers. Without that supply chain, most of us wouldn’t know what to do.

This situation is actually becoming worse, rather than better. When I compare my generation (I’m in my 50s) to that of my children, I see some striking differences. In my generation it was normal for a boy to grow up learning how to do a wide variety of trade skills from his father, and seemingly everyone knew how to do basic carpentry and mechanic work. But that’s no longer normal.

If we extrapolate it back, we can see that my father’s generation knew even more – and my grandparent’s generation even more. Those older generations were much more closely tied to the roots of an agricultural society, where people were self-reliant. There are multiple skills they had which modern society no longer considers necessary.

But if we were to have a breakdown in society, those skills which we never bothered to learn would become essential. Those who don’t know these skills would either have to learn or die trying.

1. Gardening for Food

During World War II, there was a campaign for people to plant “Victory Gardens” at their homes. These vegetable gardens were needed to alleviate food shortages, because so much of the nation’s produce was being sent overseas to keep our troops and those of our allies fighting. With fewer men available to work the farms, there was less produce available.

This custom of having a vegetable garden in one’s backyard survived for many years after the war was over, but it gradually died out. Today, when many people think of gardening, they are thinking of a flower garden. While those are nice to look at, they don’t give you much to eat.

Starting and growing a vegetable garden can be harder than most people think. When I started gardening, it took me three years to get more than just herbs and a smattering of produce out of it. I’m glad I didn’t wait until I needed that garden for survival.

2. Animal Husbandry

Although the industrial revolution took place more than 100 years ago, many people continued to raise at least a small amount of their own livestock at home. This led to cities enacting ordinances limiting what animals people could keep within city limits.

Raising dogs and cats is much different than raising chickens, rabbits and goats for the table. A large part of being able to raise these animals is recognizing their needs and being able to diagnose their sicknesses. Farmers don’t depend upon the vet for most illnesses; they take care of it themselves.

3. Food Preservation

It’s rare to find people who preserve their own foods, but in our grandparent’s generation, it was common. Canning food, smoking meats and even making one’s own sausage were all common home tasks, which ensured that people had enough food to get through the winter. Today, it’s rare to find people who know these methods of food preservation, let alone having the equipment needed.

If we go back very far in American live, pretty much every middle class home had a smokehouse for preserving meats. I’ve seen some homes where the smokehouse was actually in the kitchen chimney. Instead of building a normal chimney, they had a very wide one, with enough room to hang sides of beef in it for smoking.

4. Blacksmithing

You might think that blacksmithing goes all the way back to the Old West, but in actuality it is a skill that stayed around much longer than that. My dad was a blacksmith in his later years, although most of the work he did was ornamental.

I remember traveling in Mexico about 20 years ago and having a spring on my car’s suspension break. A local blacksmith fashioned me a new spring, tempered and shaped exactly right for my vehicle. Blacksmiths can make or repair just about anything out of metal. Yet few today know this valuable skill.

Maybe we don’t need blacksmiths today, but if an EMP hit the country and we were without electrical power, the skills of a blacksmith would allow people to have their tools repaired — and new ones fashioned. Since the manufacturing plants presumably would be shut down, that ability would be essential for rebuilding America.

5. Basic Carpentry

Everyone should know how to make basic repairs to their home. Without the ability to repair damage from a natural disaster, it might not be possible to use the home as a survival shelter. Woodworking skills also allow one to make furniture and other items to help survive.

6. Basic Mechanical Repair Depending upon the type of disaster that hits, the family car may just end up being a large paperweight. But there are many survival scenarios where it would be useful to be able to fix your car, keeping it running for general use. As long as there is gasoline, that car would be useful. The ability to diagnose and repair an engine is useful not only for keeping a car on the road, but also for fixing lawn mowers, chain saws and other power tools. 7. Herbal Medicine The roots of medicine were herbal medicine. While doctors have existed for millennia, it hasn’t been until recent times that those doctors had such a wide range of pharmaceuticals to work with. Before that, doctors made their own medicines. Many women also learned to use what nature provided for medicine. It was not uncommon a few generations back for mom to take care of her family’s medical needs, using recipes that she had learned from her mother. Today, that sort of medicine is called “old wives’ tales” but it works just as well as it always did. 8. Horseback Riding This may not seem like much of a survival skill, but in the Old West, stealing a man’s horse was a hanging offense. That’s because being stranded without a horse was generally a death sentence. While horseback riding today is only done for sport, if the automobile becomes no longer usable, people will be looking for horses once again. Riding a horse is actually more complicated than the movies make it appear. Breaking a horse is a skill that few know. Likewise, there are few today, outside of the drivers for the Budweiser Clydesdales, who know how to hitch and drive a team of horses. But in America’s past, our ancestors drove teams with as many as 40 horse or mules in them. 9. Hunting Now, I know there are a lot of hunters out there, maybe even some who are reading this. But I have to say that a lot of what we call hunting today and what I learned as a kid are nothing alike. I have a hard time calling it hunting when corn is put out as bait and the hunter hides in a blind, waiting for their choice deer to come to eat. Real hunting, at least what they did in the past, involved knowing the animal’s habits and staking out a place where the animals were likely to come. It required patience, understanding of the animals being hunted — and a pretty good shot with the rifle. 10. Butchering an Animal Raising an animal is one thing, butchering it is another. Few hunters even know how to properly butcher an animal, as most take them to a butcher for cutting up and packaging. Yet, an animal which is not properly cleaned and butchered can cause disease. You can also waste a lot of good meat by not doing it correctly.

 

 

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Survival kits are often talked about in the context of being lost in the wilderness and for obvious reasons you should have one when going to remote or even semi-remote areas.

To this day, some people find it absurd to carry a survival kit in an urban environment. The mentality is that these areas are “safer” and “help is just a call away.” Both of those excuses are untrue and when something bad happens, you will always be the first responder, which means you better be prepared.

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A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production

 

 

 

Far Left Socialists ruthlessness and willingness to break the rules.

 

Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…

www.poormansurvivor.net

ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 

Far Left Socialists ruthlessness and willingness to break the rules.

The 2020 election is a continuation of a conflict about the nature of America which began in the 1960s. The first clear and vivid political collision of that conflict was in 1972.

Because Theodore White’s Making of the President 1972 is such a compelling analysis of the conflict in which we still remain, I am using it as an outline for four consecutive columns. The first was on the general parallel between 1972 and 2020. The second was on the power of the elite media. The fourth will be on the tragic consequences of the failed ideology of the Left and the human costs of bureaucratic inertia and ideological fanaticism.

This column explores what White called “the movement” and the mutation of ideas, which led to the movement and defined its ruthlessness and willingness to break all the rules.

The liberalism which had dominated the Democratic Party from President Franklin D. Roosevelt through President John F. Kennedy began to be replaced in the 1960s. As White described it, the “Liberal Idea... hardened into the Liberal Theology."

In the 1960s, there was a swirling together of the Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights movement, the breakdown of sexual inhibition, the rise of Black Power as an ideology, the Gay Rights movement, the anti-war movement (with a radical wing willing to bomb professors and innocent citizens), and the collapse of the idea of law and order – leading to a dramatic rise in crime and violence in virtually all of our major cities. People understood that when the United States Army had to be sent into Detroit to put down a riot, something had gone terribly wrong.

By 1968, Richard Nixon could campaign on “law and order” as a central theme, and it resonated with millions of Americans.

After the 1968 election, the two parties began moving in diametrically opposed directions. Southern whites, in general, and Northern blue-collar voters (often of Catholic background) were being driven toward the Republicans by the threat of a radically changed America. On the other hand, the Democrats were increasingly dominated by the demands of the Left.

As White described it:

“Their effect could be summed up in three cardinal tenets of the Liberal Theology: (a) War Is Bad—and the American military was almost, if not quite, a criminal institution, wasteful and profligate of life and treasure; patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, and the adventure in Vietnam ‘immoral.’ (b) Black Is Good—and the demands of blacks on the general society must become, in the revision of priorities that would follow the end of the war, priority number one. And (c) since money comes easily under the modern managed economy, the belief that Money Solves All Problems, as in the rhetoric of hope, ‘If we can spend the money to reach the moon, we can spend the money to save our cities, solve cancer, purify our streams, cope with drugs, cleanse our ghettoes … etc., etc.’

 

These three tenets of the Theology were, in turn, harnessed to a political doctrine called Participation: If the people could be brought to participate in the political arena, and there freed to express their real needs, then politics would become, as it should be, the instrument of national good. Thus, out of such thinking, there developed in the years between 1968 and 1972 a formless but very powerful action group within the Democratic Party that can only be called the Movement—a movement whose roots lay in the insurgency of 1968, had been strengthened and nursed by the reforms of 1969, and whose future, as one looked forward to 1972, was obscure, yet beckoning."

The rise of this new theology had a profound impact on the nature of politics on the Left, an impact which is still there today. As White analyzed it, politics became an expression of morality. There could be no grey area or compromise – “what was morally right … must be politically sound.”

 

 

It was this spirit of ruthless imposition of the true faith which led to George McGovern and the worst Democratic defeat in modern times. The next time you listen to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, you will hear the echo of this totalitarian belief that they are moral and their opponents are immoral – and therefore anything is justified to impose righteousness on the impure.

As the Democrats talk about reparations for slavery, and as they opine on The New York Times’ 1619 Project while defending quotas against Asian-American students with better grades, it is worth remembering White’s warning that quotas largely destroyed McGovern’s candidacy. As White put it, “the liberating idea which had inspirited the Democratic Party for so long had become a trap."

It is likely that 2020 will become another trap for the Democrats.

The one candidate trying to be a centrist, former Vice President Joe Biden, is disintegrating into asserting “I want to be clear; I’m not going nuts.” As he collapses, the dynamic of the Liberal Theology and the Movement will see Warren as “mainstream.”

Welcome back to 1972 – almost a half-century later.

Your Friend,
Newt Gingrich

https://www.gingrich360.com/2019/09/2020-and-1972-part-3-the-movement/?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=e3928e5044-1972pt3_2019_09_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-e3928e5044-51914841

P.S.

We are a country in crisis. America is extremely politically polarized. It’s almost impossible to have a civil discussion about politics and political issues without emotions overflowing and people erupting. Gone are the days of real, unbiased, fact-based news — now our airwaves and device screens are dominated by opinion labeled as news.

 

NOTEWORTHY and USEFUL

 

 

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A Final Note…

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A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production