Forming a group (( after )) SHTF

Watching the Colony series , I started thinking about GROUPS of people getting together to survive. In that series some groups shletered in place ( mainly the Colonists ) while other groups were mobile.

Question got me that single survivors maybe more quiet and stealthy but more likely than not you would need a group. As they say : there is safety in numbers. So, what are the elements in deciding what group of people to join .. how big a group, what kind of a group, and how do you get to join a group.

The mere thinking of it makes me nervous. I know that ideally you should join a group BEFORE SHTF. But let's say the world went upside down , you lost your home and whole neighborhood. Your neghbors were scattered, and no one knows who is where. And you found yourself alone or with your immediate family (spouse and kids)... and needed security in numbers.

I'll again put in my $.02 for the "list, cluster, and label" decision making structure

1. free think a list of expected areas of concern

2. group "like" concepts in a cluster

3. name a label for the cluster

this will identify major areas of concern, and label the broad heading for an specialist to manage that need

I wouldn't even bother considering concealment as an issue.

I doubt that joining a group would have to be a permanent situation. Find out what you can from observation, if anyone else knows about them, and then quietly approach. Interact, and if it isn't workable, walk away. If you have food or goods, leave them stashed in a safe place. Don't trust too soon, don't run off at the mouth, don't drink, don't go after the girls or women. IOW, don't be stupid, as your life may depend on it.

It makes me nervous, too.

The only hopeful thing is that people who think alike might flock together. The ones who won't contribute may be asked to leave. The blustering self-proclaimed leaders, likewise. But that would only happen if you had a group of reasonably sturdy personalities who would stand together

They used to be called 'communes' (not just the 60s, but even eons ago), and were probably the only examples of a true classless, stateless society that have ever existed. But how long it would last is anyone's guess. There are always the people who want to control.

It's tricky at the very best.

Sue

We are always part of a group or another. At home we are part of a family. At work we are part of an establishment. And so on. Problem is that even with a long term fairly stable type of a group , like a family, you do have tense moments and stressful times. Ditto for work environment where we have jerks and stupid know-it-all's.

It is already hard to manage such difficult characters in "normal" times. Try to deal with the same when you don't have enough food, or haven't slept for two days or not bathed for 5 days, and you get a real problem. And if you seem to have something ( say a folding saw or survival knife ) that someone else needs badly, you got a bigger problem. And if he doesn't seem to differentiate between your Mora and a prybar, you will be in deep you-know-what.

Oh, and there are such people, trust me. One of our bosses at work fits the description. I just hope and pray that if SHTF while we are at work, that he will not be around.

On the other hand, SHTF sometimes seems to bring out the unexpected BEST of some people. Here in my country we have seen a few disasters where the first ( very first ) responders were teenagers whom we , older folks , didn't really like at first impression. You know what I mean ... Noisy , car skidding, law challenging , social renegades. They jumped IN to save girls from a burning school, they rushed with their jeeps to save kids stuck in school busses in tunnels gradually filling with rain. They seem to always beat the beaurocracy to disaster scenes and exhibit heroic efforts.

It is really not a black and white thing. You just can't judge who is a good guy and who is bad. So, as a guy in the fifties of age, and with a family, I will be more inclined to look around for a family or group of families with kids. Although such a group will have highest level of needs (maybe infants and/or elderly folks there) compared to available resources, and they can't all be workers/providers (since some have to stay put to take care of kids) but seems such a group is the safest to approach and join. Just my perosnal thinking.

the best "group" to join is a small quiet town, well away from large population centers, far from any major highways, off the beaten path.

one that is well established with people having a balanced diversity of useful basic skills. ie: doctors, dentists, blacksmiths, mechanics, machinists, farmers, ranchers, animal vets, plumbers, carpenters, welders, gardeners, hunters, et al.

a place not dependent on a limited number of employers, or having undesirable features (like a nuclear plant, or oil refinery, or large hazard waste recycling operation, or in a flood plain, or tornado path...)

then move there so if/when problems arise you have lived "within" for a while (unlike just owning a vacation home there), so you know the people, fit in, are a valued member of the community, are accepted and can contribute, where your skills are important and can be traded with others.

this sort of place is easy to imagine, just think of a smaller community 100-plus years ago. the hard part is finding such a place these days, but they do exist.

moving to a small rural town may be one of the best options, the bigger problem is the commitment it takes to totally change one's lifestyle to move to such a place. few are capable of doing it.

Most of the small rural towns away from the highway that I've been too just have a bunch of people who are still there because thats where they retired. There isn't much in the way of any skill set left in those small towns anymore. Sadly my own home town and the closest towns to my farm don't have much left. There is a small grocery store and a bank and a couple churches but any other businesses have all moved out.

agreed. very true that its the current situation most places.

out here in the inland Pac NW there are places where old pioneer families settled and still ranch today, with small towns hours apart, that each have some semblance of self-reliance and a strong sense of community. they do exist, but are becoming rarer each decade.

30 years ago writer mel tappan picked Rogue River Oregon for these same reasons i listed. today the choices are fewer and further between, but not impossible to find.

Another possibility is to form your own group. If you join one that has people who think like you, ask them if they would be interested in diverging into a separate group.

Sue

+1 on what Wiley Coyote about small towns. FYI, a town of 500 might have a mechanic but a town of about 2,000 will have a doctor and grocery store. 2,000 seems to be the critical mass to support both a doctor and a grocery store which are vital (even though the grocery store may go under it could always serve as a logical location for a market). Once you get over 5,000 people in one town you start seeing a lot of deadbeats. Beyond that, you've got the county level which hopefully will have less than 20,000 but ideally be closer to 15,000 or less in population.

A small town is the best setup because it works in good times and bad. Communes and ad hoc retreat communities struggle in good times (why are we doing all this?) and they struggle in bad times (Why am I doing all the work compared to others?) and there is always a power struggle over money and resources. It's not impossible but it's difficult. At least in a small town, everyone has separate lives and separate property rights until they decide to come together to defend the town.

Blood ties are the strongest there are. Our culture has burned into us respect for our elders and trust among immediate family. Now if you're in a dysfunctional family now, then all bets off, but if you family has a firm footing in the 10 commandments then that's the group you want to start with.

Kurt Saxon wrote quite a bit about this topic if you're looking for further reading.

So to get back to the original question - my answer is that your group should be your immediate family quickly followed by 2,000 folks... a small rural town.

I see two issues with this theory:

1. Small towns no longer exist in the quantity or quality that they used to. The necessary survival skills are not really there. Go to any small town grocery store on the first of the month and see how many whip out a gov't EBT card to pay for their food.

2. Even if the idyllic 'Mayberry' existed, there are simply too many people now for this to work....millions more than in the Great Depression. An outpouring from population centers will overwhelm all small towns, especially in the more temperate zones.

I think what might work is a resurgence of churches as real social centers. They are already spread throughout population centers, and some still have the roots of social programs in place like they did in hard times in the past. A place to meet, trade, get food, socialize, get educated, get married, get buried, have meetings, coordinate charity and relief...that's what used to happen in local churches.

Thats even if the grocery store still exists. Ours Walmart came in and opened one store in the county and under cut local stores prices until they all closed then raised their prices. So now instead of going to the small grocery store everyone has to drive an hour to pay higher prices at Walmart.
My mother likes our Amazon wish list for the kids because they have so little of a selection of decent stuff there.

I agree that the small towns I'm talking about are very hard to find, but they do still exist. It takes searching through a lot of census data and also getting in the car and driving a lot of backroads.

In my own searching, I started at the county level. There are only about 3,000 counties in the USA so that is a manageable place to start. You can find this information at http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/ and then information on each county on wikipedia or just google searching.

I started by searching for counties that had less than 15,000 people which knocked out about 70% of the counties. Then I narrowed further by looking for a whole host of other attributes I wanted like water, soil types, remoteness from interstates, property tax levels, number of churches, etc. and ended up with about 50 counties spread out all over the US. You can certainly use the EBT card user population as one of your criteria to ferret out the freeloaders. Information on poverty is available on Wikipedia for every county in the US.

Of the 50 counties I liked, I then visited probably 20 of them in person to look at small towns in those counties. This took several years of part time researching to finish. That's the level of research you have to be willing to do to find the right area for you. It's not going to just fall in your lap unless you are incredibly lucky.

I say this facetiously but buy and watch The Waltons on DVD, seasons 1-9, throwing in a couple of the Thanksgiving specials for good measure.

I say facetious because if you have to watch The Waltons to get your sense of family values it may be too late. You see a family getting by in an idealized manner but basically through hard work by all members for a long long time - including child laborers working the orchards and any kind of job whenever they can. Money can be tight and mortgages and the taxman are a constant, so endless toil is the name of the game. Keeping your expensive data plan and the iPhone is unlikely, and we may find a new love for old school news papers and post offices as crucial social landmarks. College for everyone is also unlikely unless the family is extremely lucky and dedicated and the student exceptionally worthy of a scholarship. There are a thousand indignities and adjustments in a severe recession or depression, my family lived through the one in the 70s and 80s and we had our share together. But we all made it out alive, and intact, although scarred in that funky Reagan-era manner of permanent scarring. Big warning though, many families spun apart too.

The good news is that endless toil is approximately how we work our way out of the current financial mess, so your contributions will be welcomed by society. Which points to the second layer beyond strong family ties and commitments - church, schools, and whatever community you live in. You remember, places where you should already be investing your lives and evenings and your souls now. Because if you aren't, you're missing out. Whether that means attending PTA meetings and lending a hand in your kids' activities, volunteering places such as working the homelessness committee in your church, or sitting and witnessing and commenting and debating while your city council fritters away your tax dollars. Filling your time with work and effort instead of hours counting rounds in your ammo bunker or watching TV. Yes, these activities will also be the bedrock of our communities when times get tough, and they will see us through hard times. One observation I have of the current Occupy [Where ever] movement is that taken individually and as a collective, they don't appear to have invested very much in their communities, but surely have expectations for radical changes to them. So good luck with that - alot of the folks they purport to speak for may disagree with their motives, methods, and expected outcomes. Folks vested in their communities will tend to frown on outliers who come in with new ideas to replace their hard work and dedication wholesale.

The ties that bind - I contend they are stronger and more numerous than anything that we can imagine. Make those ties for yourself if you haven't already. Prepare: prepare your local community to better clothe, feed and shelter those who cannot now, because tomorrow you could be your own best customer. And get in the habit of treating folks with the same sense of compassion and dignity you want to be treated with, since someday it will be you needing assistance. We can't even imagine how many ties we already have in our lives until we really need them. Times get hard, and we see failure and assume we need a new diktat, a new bogeyman. But like every generation before us, we have seen the enemy and it is us. The ties that bind outnumber the bogeymen - we have nothing to fear but fear itself. We won't face roving bands of vagabonds off the set of Thunderdome, we'll have the same boring council meetings and the efforts of friends, family and neighbors all trying to piece together their communities in times of little or no money. We will see soup kitchens long before we see starvation in our splendid suburban isolations. And lots of sweat equity, because that's what sees us through hard times.

Small towns are wonderful. But many people require specialized medical care for survival and quality of life. Eventaully you'll need a dentist, opthamologist, gastroenterologist, etc, with modern facilities. Not to mention medications.

Larger cities (50,000+) will likely have those resources, even during a financial collapse type scenario. Larger cities also tend to have robust trade/barter systems. Again, small towns are great, but our dependence on cities for acccess to goods and services is here to stay.

us hicks currently travel to the big city for specialized medical care, and would continue to do so unless the cities we needed to get to became too dangerous to visit.

if you're suggesting that travel may become extremely tough during hard times, then i have doubts the systems and people required to support those "specialized medical care" facilities would be able to continue to offer such services.

ie: if such travel becomes that impossible, how will folks in places of a population of 50K+ get food and fuel which allow them to even live/work there?

and should it get to the barter stage, what sort of valuable goods would apartment-dwelling city folks have to trade for the necessaries like food/fuel/water?

i would think any large-town/city that big would be in worse shape than a smaller community surrounded by farms and cattle ranches, creeks and ponds, timber of firewood, with areas within walking distance for hunting/fishing/foraging, even if we had to depend on self-medicating, vet-style with vet supplies, as we've done for years.

just saying...

Different members of my family have camped out in hospital parking lots miles away from home because a loved one was in for major medical care, it becomes a coordinated effort, someone takes them there, someone else stays a certain amount of time, rotate out ones that are able to stay, etc.
You get used to being without, my parents for example live up to a week at a time without electricity in the winters, they have a generator and wood stove and eventually the electric company makes it out to their end and fixes the lines. You get used to not having a reliable telephone and keep your emergency cell phone charged and ready with a few pre-paid minutes.
We had to leave the house at 5am to make it in time for surgery for my father a few years ago. It started snowing around 5pm the sunday evening before and dumped a record 14 inches of snow on us, my 2wd which was fine in the big city just barely made it there.
The local town is dependent on the local military to plow them out, can't afford snow plows.
Its interesting though, our county all the old family farms are being sold to people who moved from the cities, they retire and can afford to buy a farm and live off their 401k and other investments.

Many of the small towns have lost their own identity and are simply bedroom communities for the reasonably-nearest city. That is what my town is.

The local clinic belongs to a hospital chain, all the medical people are employees, so they have no real investment. I was talking to the local gas station owner, and he said he doesn't really know a safe way to pump gas out of the underground tanks using makeshift methods. And would they be refilled? The water association is local, most of the tanks are on hills, but if they lose power for very long, I don't think they could refill the tanks.

It's really hard to make plans because we don't know exactly how it's going to play out. Will the basic infrastructure remain? Will the people who keep the power running volunteer their time if the company goes broke? Fuel?

I suspect that we will be very, very sorry that most of our manufacturing is outsourced. Even if we did want to start it up, we don't have the machinery or the trained personnel or, in most cases, even the knowledge of what needs to be done. Exactly how long would it take to set up a shovel and spading fork factory operation?

The Waltons had it 'easy', because they owned their own place, had the tools they needed, had the knowledge to get multiple jobs done, and their family and social structures were already in place. The people of the town were already used to helping each other.

If the banking situation really crashes, and they forgave the home loans, that would give most people breathing space. But that's just one problem.

I am looking around my area at the multiple small acreages that are just growing grass. But our soil is quite poor due to the leaching of nutrients from the heavy rainfall. Agronomists say that 25" of rain per year, properly spaced, is relatively ideal. Enough, but not too much; we get twice that amount. The land is there, but where would the nutrients come from? Even the livestock here would starve if they didn't get supplement feed.

If there is a survival situation to make most people sweat, this is it.

Sue