Subprime loans. The words are now jarring, synonymous with past failures and perhaps indicative of future ones. Wall Street has been reeling from the collapse of financial institutions who specialized in giving subprime loans during the mid-00’s housing bubble, jumping up, falling down and spinning in circles like a hypoglycemic toddler in need of a cookie.
Today’s tantrum had investors biting past their fingernails straight to the bone as stocks plummeted and the Federal Reserve had to inject billions into the banking system not once, not twice, but three times before the market closed. Things look grim. We’ve been hearing augural proclamations for weeks now (Cramer’s televised breakdown among them). If we have another stock market crash, we may be monumentally fucked on a level unseen since the great depression. Our President is mired in Wilsonian ineptitude, our infrastructure is crumbling and our government agencies are a dozen cards short of a full deck.
If the shit storm turns into a Category 5 shit hurricane, my friend Monika and I have devised a survival plan.* We’re going to gather up our more useful loved ones and mayhap a few strangers** and go off the grid. We’ll make for the Southern Andes in South America, where we’ll start a self-sustaining commune. I will give advanced instruction in the mystic arts, while Monika will teach our motley crew of city slicker proto-occultists how to hunt and gather with nothing more than a bowie knife, a broken iPhone and a sharpened stick. We will send scouts back to civilization every year or so to access whether the situation has improved enough to allow those who chose to return to civilization to do so.
Huh. Our immanent economic Armageddon suddenly doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
*Our plan will only work with a limited number of people, so don’t get any ideas.
**Applications will be accepted. Be sure to list any survival skills and include proof that you have a strong work ethic.
