Learn from the chaos in Greece
he New York Times has posted a great writeup called "The Way Greeks Live Now." Here's an excerpt:
"By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience ... A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards."
Apparently, the Greeks that are coping best are the ones that are leaving their jobs in the cities and going "back to the land." The article describes how, "Former accountants and Web designers are growing potatoes on Naxos, collecting resin from mastic trees on Chios and tending wheat fields on Crete. On the cloud-rimmed top of Mount Othrys, in the region of Magnesia, Ioannis Tsokaras, who a year ago quit the civil-service job in Athens from which he had endured one too many pay cuts, showed me what he is now, at 58, staking his hopes on: little yellow-green clumps of an herb called sideritis, or “mountain tea.” He was intent on turning what had been a sideline — cultivating wild herbs on land his family owned — into a living.
Certainly a cautionary tale for TF readers. If this can happen in the cradle of Western Civilization, it can happen anywhere. Moral of the story: start growing those veggies before TSHTF!
