War Nerd Gary Brecher of The Exiled, doesn’t think the end of the world as we know it will solve anything. Many of our readers have considered TEOTWAWKI – a system reset, a chance to start over, but would SHTF be as fun as it sounds?
See, that’s what’s sad about all this: the post-disaster world will be just like this one, only worse. All the lousy coworkers and squabbles and crap, but none of the luxuries. The winners won’t be the zombies, just another set of bosses. The end of the world is what you call it when your tribe loses. It may be the end of the world for them, like it was for hundreds of native tribes all over the world, but when your world ends like that, you don’t get to play out the game in some cool ruins out of a video game. Some other tribe takes over, that’s all. And when they do, there’s no way on earth you can hole up in your townhouse with a semi-automatic weapon and hold out. Because it’s organization that wins, not lone gunmen. If you want to survive, join a club. It only looks like chaos to the losers. The Mongols are my classic example here. They were a “horde†to the people whose asses they kicked, but if those losers had had the sense to accept Mongol vassalage (which the Mongols usually offered before they started leveling everything to the horizon) they’d have found out that the Mongols were actually better organized than their opposition. Most of the time the Mongol armies faced armies made up of a few professional soldiers and huge peasant levies, led by guys who were born into the job. Half of them were opium addicts, retards, lazy whoremongers, or macho idiots. That’s what you get when you trust a family tree.
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We’d love for the world to end, or we think we would. (First toothache or skin disease and you’ll change your mind, though.) But too bad, or cheer up, whichever; it’s never going to happen.
So why does everybody talk about it all fucking day? Simple: it’s the most fun idea in the world. Think about it. Every zombie movie is about how great it’d be to have the city to yourself. No crowds, no annoying other people, just a free-fire zone where you’re the only real human being and you can blow the head off anything that tries to bite you or borrow a quarter, whatever. A lifetime shopping spree, total immunity to all the laws—like being a star, and if you were the last person on earth you’d be a star by like default. No competition.
Sometimes you even get to have a dog, like in I Am Legend. But no people. That’s the dream here. And that’s why nobody faces the pretty durn obvious fact that after the apocalypse, alliances, partnerships, gangs, whatever you want to call them, are going to be tighter, stricter, more important than ever. Because that’s no fun. It’s just life at the office only without AC, TV, or the net. There’s never gonna be an end of the world. There’s gonna be an end of you, you personally; but the world won’t even flinch. You’ll be lucky to get an obituary, a half inch next to the weather report on the back page of Section B. The world is never gonna end. That’s what’s depressing.
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