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I remember a conversation with once and future TTAG contributor Martin Albright about SHTF scenarios, bug-out bags, The End of the World As We Know It (the apocalypse not the song), cheerful stuff like that. The combat vet set me straight on timing. “You don’t wake-up one day and society has disappeared,” Martin said. “Aside from natural disasters—which are temporary—it doesn’t happen that way. Society falls apart slowly, like it did in Yugoslavia. Bus and garbage service becomes irregular, small crimes go unpunished, graffiti covers public buildings, bribery becomes more commonplace, gangs or militias move in—it’s a gradual evolution from civilization to something a lot less civilized.” Motown residents can relate. Especially its once and future gun owners.

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23 COMMENTS

  1. The Writing has been on the Wall for many decades. America has lost touch with those traits and values that make for a strong and growing society (and country), and embraced thinking that denies reality. There are of course several ideologies, beliefs, practices, causes, and reasons for the decline of America. Political socialists may or not have noble lofty ideals to change society yet forcing people and firms to pay high taxes, obey anti-business laws and policies, and live by rigid codes that treats people like serfs and children has its unintended consequences.

    Since readers like to bash on Chicago style thinking, I think this is interesting:
    “A larger-than-expected exodus over the past 10 years reduced the population of Chicago to a level not seen in nearly a century.
    “The black decline is really powering the city loss,” Mr. Frey said, calling it “part of the great reverse migration to the South.”
    http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/chicago-population-slips-to-1920-levels/

    Imagine that. Someone please tell Obama that Chicago blacks are choosing to move from anti-gun progressive Chicago to the more traditional valued South which btw is very pro-gun.

    • If McCain ever bothered to tell you who Obama actually was in his prior life, you’d know that his main work in Chicago before gain election to the Illinois state senate was representing developer clients trying to move people out of the Chicago projects into new housing further south, some actually in the south Chicago suburbs, so that the real players in Chicago could build commercial space and high-end condos where the projects were. Valerie Jarrett, the power in the White House, was the chief of the Chicago Housing Authority through that era, as was her father Robert Taylor before her. Is this a great country or what?

      • The point of my comment above is two-fold. The main point is that part of the drain of population from Chicago was to the suburbs…and not all to the Southern U.S. The other point is that this is an issue with which the current administration is very familiar in detail.

  2. Along the lines of the broken window theory.

    Hard to reverse deterioration as that takes work.

  3. It’s cool. Soon enough OCP will buy the city’s debt, then Robocop will be on the scene to clean up the streets.

  4. There are reasons why Detroit and the Amercain Auto Industry is a failure which leads to conditions such as this. These problems are not confined to just Detroit and the Auto Industry.

    • The UAW has to take some of the blame for ruining the US auto industry, but that will never happen.

      • Yeah, it’s got to be the UAWs fault. The little peon on the factory floor is the reason the car companies don’t make money. PPPLLLLEEEEAAASSSSSEEE. It’s the OVERPAID CEOs that make all the decisions, not the little guy working his a** off trying to make a living.

        • They’re all corrupt shit, they enable each other. Thank Xenu there’s competition that puts their failure in public perspective.

        • The UAW was one part of the piggy failure puzzle and should be blamed. It was not alone.
          The CEOs and management were incompetent and overpaid.
          The government on all levels was not conducive to a pro auto business and industry environment.
          I have a blanket blame policy.

  5. Good to see that the old cliche’s about the city still dominate peoples minds. Detroit is not what it once was pre 67 riots, but neither is it 30 seconds from going up in flames and everyone walking away like it was at the end of the Kwame Kilpatrick reign of greed and corruption.

    Block by block the city is turning around and while it may never be what it once was, it will one day in the not to distant future be a force to be reckoned with again.

  6. I love the part where they say you are going to live where we want you to live! Doesn’t anyone find this a little disturbing????

  7. Actually, things DID go bad nearly overnight in parts of Yugoslavia. There were signs, but it wasn’t a long process.

    http://shtfschool.com/security/the-5-first-symptoms-of-shtf/

    There was a long thread in another forum from a guy in Bosnia about his city, where things pretty much did collapse overnight. There were rumors, but the various leadership types were on TV assuring everyone not to worry. Then the power and water went out, and the snipers started shooting at everyone moving outside. Then things got ugly.

  8. Albright isn’t wrong, he’s just 1/2 right. It happens two ways, fast or slow. Recall that Detroit, like Newark, Oakland, and Camden, was one of the first cities selected for the Federal Model Cities program…and that was in the mid-’60’s. Detroit’s decline has been very long in the making. Unions, government salaries and thus taxes, inefficient services, all were breaking the city before 1975, after which the decline accelerated. Small Greek cities, on the other hand, have been experiencing very rapid economic decline, as will a number of Spanish cities over the next two years.

  9. When I started hearing folks talk about their welfare checks as their “paychecks”, I had figured out that our country’s future is not going to be a good one.

  10. Spot on. Our cities will turn into northern Mexico long before they turn into “The Book of Eli”.

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