But I live in a university town of 120k (plus 30K students) in a rural area of 300 000. I moved here for the job — the “I cannot boil water” crew exist in the big city (1.4 million and counting) I grew up in.

When I was a teenager, I had a bra burning friend who proudly told me one day that she couldn’t even boil water. I’d been cooking since I was 10 years old, and was disgusted, What she saw as freedom from female shackles I knew was only helplessness. (And a future of bad food.)

A few months ago I accompanied my daughter’s class on a field trip to a 19th century settlement re-creation. At the blacksmithing demo, the blacksmith informed us that there were many skills earlier blacksmiths had, that have been lost. Pondering this I wrote:

“…We have made such a mistake in modern society. We have allowed ourselves to forget the skills of the past – disdained those skills. How arrogant! We would die so quickly if our vaunted modern tech were wiped out. It is so top heavy and fragile … what we should do is work to preserve these old skills … [Using these re-created settlements as] Organized preservation against future need instead of just demoing the odd way people used to live, to school children … We sit atop our technological tower of Babel, full of pride in our accomplishments and say, “We are so wise, we have built so well, we will never fall.”

Those who are dependent on what is given to them by a socialist state are the first to die in the event of disaster, whether natural or political. Their lives are at the mercy of fate, and the whims of other people.