The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  This left the eldest daughter of the pastor in charge by a form of default. There were deacons of the church and such but they were doing other things to assist the community. The emergency services of the entire county ended up on the shoulders of a petite nineteen-year-old girl.

  People who had special needs were brought to the church. A community kitchen was set up. Pews were moved and cots put in their place. People brought in food and supplies as they had them. Emergency crews trying to get power restored had first priority on food and beds. Then children. Then the elderly. Then "associated workers," that is everyday citizens who were helping out. Last were general refugees. If you were able-bodied and unwilling to help, you by God got the last of the food if there was any.

  The priority was established by the preacher's daughter and nobody argued with her. And every time that things seemed to be on the brink of disaster, out of food, out of wood for fireplaces, out of blankets, in the words of the young lady in charge, "The Lord would provide."

  Note: The limited effect of SARS and H5N1 leads people like this remarkable young lady to suggest the real reason isn't free-market medicine or hormones or "voluntary random associations" but that the Lord God looks over America. Given that "bigoted" and "stupid" and "backward" areas like Blackjack had lower mortality rates than more "enlightened" areas, even if similarly rural, it is occasionally hard to argue the logic.

  They did not wait for the King to tell them what to do. They did not even wait for the local Lord, their elected county and city representatives, to tell them what to do. They just gathered in "voluntary random associations" and did whatever seemed to be the right thing at the time.

  And it saved our nation.

  Now we get to "who do you trust?" Well, you trust "us" whatever that "us" might be. Yes, if we're continuing this narrative, the white-bread residents of Smokey Hollow subdivision are not going to trust outsiders. They especially don't trust outsiders that don't look like them. Are they wrong?

  Blackjack, again, was an interesting case. The local churches did not just take in those from their church. They ministered to anyone in need, which included Hispanic migrant farm workers as well as people who had become stranded on roads trying to escape the Plague. Did they trust those people? The answers given to the researchers were very Southern. Which means as opaque as a Japanese koan. "They were, by and large, nice people." "Did you trust them?" "They were, by and large, nice people."

  The answer seemed to be "no." At least in the definition of "societal trust." But they also didn't turn them away. In places there were small towns and counties that closed their borders but Blackjack was, fortunately, far from major metropolitan areas and thus never reached the point of "overrun" with refugees.

  The young lady in charge, however, only had problems from members of two minority groups: Hispanic males and African-American females. Neither group would accept her authority unless she brought in a male. Generally, that was one of the emergency workers who was catching a brief rest and a bite of whatever food was available. They were tired, they were frustrated already and they were very clear: You get what you're given, you give what help you can give or you get the hell out and go starve in the wilderness.

  The news was still working and occasionally this sort of thing, or the "bigoted" counties that turned away refugees were pointed out on the news as signs of how "backward" such areas were.

  Backwards and bigoted or just smart, wise even?

  Let us take a look at our kumbaya brethren, what we can piece together of their narrative.

  Comparing a city to a small, rural county would be ingenuous. I'll get to cities later. In the meantime, let's look at another case study.

  Lamoille County, Vermont.

  The county seat, Hyde Park, was a small town. The largest populated area in the county, Morrisville, had a population of 2000 just like Blackjack. The surrounding county had some farming but was primarily a "bedroom community" of mixed semi-retireds, "crafty" artisans and various others who for one reason or another could escape to the wilderness. Some of the homes were rentals but at the first touch of Plague the owners fled their suburban or urban residences and headed for the hills.

  The county went 87% for Warrick. To call it bedrock rural "blue" is an understatement. The county government had issued nonbinding resolutions against the War in Iraq, the War in Iran, global-warming and every other cause celebre of the left. It had issued proclamations lamenting the fact that Lamoille was so intensively white-bread. Where are all our little brown brethren? Don't they know the Berkshires is the place to be?

  Lamoille followed Frau Warrick's orders to the letter. Since they received a small shipment of vaccine, they were able to store about a third of their doses and kept the rest in styrofoam shipping containers. They violated the orders only to the extent of sending enough doses to the emergency services for them to spread their innoculations.

  Instead of calling for people to come to the county health centers, though, they went out. They went first to nursing homes and innoculated all the old people. They got virtually every oldster that was in a nursing home or other care facility and that didn't object. Then they went to schools. That was harder. They had to get permission from the parents, first. Many of the parents were camped out at the, closed, county health centers so that was tough. They gave the schools a few days to get permission slips. God forbid they innoculate some poor dear when the parents objected.

  The Plague hit Lamoille County in earnest about two weeks after they received the vaccine. Some of the vaccine had gone bad without refrigeration but not most. It was chilly in Vermont and it was stored in a back room. It, mostly, kept. But the only people vaccinated in the county, for all practical purposes, were the elderly, county workers, emergency service workers, some of the latter two's families and one school.

  (Patient Zero at Copley Health Systems was a stockbroker from Massachusetts. His method of infection was never precisely determined. And many subsequent patients had never had interaction with him. But by then the Plague was really getting around.)

  It took them two weeks to get to that point. At which point the schools shut down because parents were keeping their kids home, anyway.

  It snowed that March in Vermont. It was a very cold and wet spring. People died. They were sometimes buried in backyards. People walked out and talked to their neighbors. There was some "voluntary random association" of local groups.

  And at that point, it stopped. A few people, many of them long-term locals, gathered in larger groups centered around churches. The vast majority of the county, however, sat in their houses and waited for the King (Queen, actually) to tell them what to do.

  Why?

  Well, one reason was purely political. The vast majority of the "transport" population of Lamoille were liberals. Liberals Believe in the government the way that the young lady in Blackjack Believes in the Lord. It's almost a disservice to refer to such people as liberals. They were, in fact, aristocratists. They were very Old Country in that they felt that beyond their little fence it was the King's duty to fix things.

  On average after one week they were out of Maslov's basic necessities, food, water. They then mostly drove to the nearest town to find help. They found dozens and hundreds of their mental brethren doing the same thing. The few "voluntary random associations" that had formed around churches or other societal groups tried to help at first. But there was no significant reciprocation. The transports felt that it was the duty of others to help them in need but not their duty to reciprocate. They wanted to be fed and watered and given shelter because it was a Right. From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs. I have no abilities but I have lots of needs.

  The voluntary associations, of necessity, started turning them away. Even if they had, societally, trusted the transports (and there had always been a degree of friction) they quickly learned that it was misguided.

  En masse the transports complained to what was lef
t of the county administration, accusing the voluntary associations of hoarding, bigotry, being badness. The county began rounding up supplies and distributing them, as was the right thing to do in any communist county. There was resistance from the ants that had prepared when the grasshopper, in a situation of survive or die and too many had already died, came to take his gathered seeds. In some cases, literally.

  Farms were ordered to bring in all their food stuffs. Of course farms have vast stores of food. They're farms!

  Uh . . . no. I mean, farmers tend to build up some personal stores in cans and such. Sure. But they don't store bulk grain, for example, on site. When they harvest it, it gets shipped to silos and distributed further. If they do have a couple of silos filled with what looks like grain, that's what's called seed. It's what you make more food from. Unless, of course, you eat it.

  Farmers were preparing for planting season at that point. Some of them had seed in their silos. It was confiscated. Those that weren't already using "organic farming" methods or had genmod seeds were roundly castigated. A couple of the local farmers resisted, forcibly, having their seed taken from them. They lost in the end. More deaths.

  And all the time the grasshoppers were wanting to know what the gub'mint was going to do to help them. They were protesting and shouting and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

  Were all of them being idiots? No, no more than "random association" worked perfectly in high trust zones. But, statistically, "blue" counties had lower levels of local volunteerism on every level, from helping their neighbor to assisting in large-scale voluntary associations.

  Why? These were, by and large, the people who spoke the most fulsomely of communal living, of everyone binding together in some sort of vast communistic surge to make the world a perfect utopia. And all organic, mind you. This general class of people, looked at in macrocosm, had the most experts in it on communal association of any class of people in the U.S. They should have been the biggest "voluntary associators" in the country.

  Looked at in macrocosm. The hard-core believers in communal association, though, made up a small fraction of the overall "blue" group. Less than five percent. And most of them were already in "voluntary random associations." It's called a commune. And a commune where everyone voluntarily and randomly believes in communal living sometimes works. Sometimes. Generally, though, it don't.

  Let's look at the most famous commune in history, even if most people don't know it was one: The Plymouth Colony.

  That's right, the Pilgrims were communists. Oh, they didn't have the words and they sure didn't have Marx's great "From everyone according to their abilities to everyone according to their needs" line. But the original charter of the Plymouth Colony, the Mayflower Compact, was clear: Share and share alike.

  This lasted through one year in The New World. A year with a death rate that made the Plague, at least in the U.S., look like a minor cold. They simply didn't grow enough food to make it to the next harvest. Various reasons. They were lousy farmers. They didn't understand the soil and weather conditions. But the most important thing they learned, forget putting fish heads under the corn if you got that in elementary school, was that if you treated the people who were doing the majority of the work exactly the same as those who would not or could not contribute as much to the community, the workers eventually decided to work less hard. And farming at that level is, trust me, very hard work.

  Let's look back at Blackjack and that remarkable young lady. She looked at the situation very clearly and made a list of who really needed food and shelter. First, the guys who were officially trying to rectify things. They were out working hard every day to try to fix the disaster that was still ongoing. If things were ever going to get better it was going to depend, to a great degree, on them. Some of them were female. They got fed the same as males; take all you can eat, eat all you take. Then kids and the elderly. Okay, that fell into two categories but, face it, kids and old people don't eat much. And it was, after all, a church. Think "Christian charity."

  Then the "random associators" got fed. These were the men and women that were doing things in the community to help out. They weren't going to save the world but they were saving lives and supporting the church's efforts. Farms get a mention here. At one point, according to the stories from that case study, they ate okra soup for three days. Why? Because there was a farm that just happened to have a bunch of okra. They offered it to the church for the refugees. One of the deacons from the church, a "voluntary random associator" went out and picked it up and brought it back. Those were the people who were next in line for food and beds.

  Last, and certainly least, were the refugees who could help but did not. They were fed last, if there was food. Why? Because they simply didn't matter. If they all died, it wasn't going to offend God or Man because live or die they weren't fixing the situation. They were waiting for the King to make it Right. They were grasshoppers. They were the people that Da Vinci spoke of when he said "Most men are good for naught more than turning good food into shit."

  Another true study. In any disaster situation, after the disaster is over and things are back to some degree of normal, ten percent of the refugees in temporary shelter have to be forcibly removed. No matter how bad it is, if they don't have to do anything they're content to sit on their ass. By the same token, there's another ten percent that, no matter how bad it is, has to help. Disaster professionals leave a certain number of blank spots in their response group because they know that there are going to be people who simply cannot sit on their ass and not help out. Giving them pre-specified jobs keeps them from being a nuisance. They're also very temporary slots because the same people will leave the refugee environment as fast as possible. Probably to head back to their communities and see how they can help out.

  Grasshoppers. Ants.

  Back to Lamoille County. The vast majority of the "transport" population, the crafty artisans and semi-retireds and such weren't true communalists. They were grasshoppers.

  Look, I'll give you an example of the difference in another disaster: Hurricane Katrina.

  Forget the suboptimal response of New Orleans, a city of grasshoppers led by a grasshopper, vs. Mississippi. Forget all the rest. This is a personal story from when I was a kid.

  Like everybody else I watched the news when the disaster hit New Orleans. And I grew up on Fox or nothing. But even that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because of what was happening, because of how it was being covered.

  I recall this one incident clearly. It's never a thing they replay over the years when stuff comes up about Katrina but I recall it clearly as day.

  Shepard Smith was interviewing people down by where the water stopped. When the TV crew first got there there was this guy standing up to his hips in that rotten fucking water. Skinny little black guy, looked like he might have had a drug habit or maybe he was a street person. I dunno, but he was skinny as fuck. He was, when they arrived, helping an old lady out of the water. Walking back to the land with her. When she got to land he turned around to go back out.

  Shepard Smith stopped him and asked him what he was doing. The guy said he'd been there all morning, it was a bit after noon and looked hot as shit, helping people through the water. He hadn't had anything to eat or drink. (It's been noted that the news people never seemed to offer except to one lady with a baby that looked as if it was dying.) There was some back and forth then the guy went back out to help another lady.

  This bitch, though, was about a hundred pounds overweight. She was bitching up a storm, too. She had on some sort of ID hanging on a lanyard, didn't see what it was. She was sure bitching, though. By God, where was the government! She'd been in her apartment for two days waiting for help and no help done come! Where the hell was the help! Nobody was helping us! We's got nothing and nobody doan care!

  Did the cameras tune her out and go back to the good Samaritan up to his hips in water that was probably eating away his fucking legs?

  No,
they followed her. They caught every bitch and complaint. She just kept walking and they just kept following until the segment ended.

  Let's be clear, here. This is a digression about the media. They had a fucking hero right in their fucking sights and they chose to follow a fucking complainer. Here is a guy killing himself to help others and they follow the overweight bitch that wants to know "why's nobody heppin us?"

  But it's also about grasshoppers and ants. I don't care if the guy in the water was a heroin addict who lived by stealing purses. He was a fucking ant. When the shit hit the fan he helped others and didn't wait for the King to tell him what to do. He jumped into the fucking breach.

  The fat bitch? Grasshopper. I don't give a shit if that ID was for some job somewhere and the guy in the water was a street person. She was a grasshopper, he was an ant. "I waited for somebody to help me. Why didn't somebody help me? You should help me. The government should help me."

  Me. Me. Me. Me. Fucking Me.

  (Ran into Shepard in Iran one time and was forced by higher to give him an interview. He tried like hell to be charming. I admit I was less so. I suppose some day I've got to explain why, but it's one of those things from your childhood you just remember, you know? You're trying to figure out how to be an adult and you look at that and go; "Well, I'm not going to be like that bastard Shepard Smith, giving the limelight to a bitching grasshopper while a hero toils away behind his back." Addendum: Turns out it was his producer's fault, not his. Okay, so I'm not perfect, I should have realized he was just the ventriloquist's dummy. In that case, his producer is an idiot. Sorry, Shepard.)

  Me. It's all about me. Okay, they were called the Me generation. Yes, the vast majority of Lamoille County were baby boomers. "If it feels good do it" was the mantra. "It's all about me."

  Well, you know in peace and plenty (brought to you in great degree by us ants) "It's all about me" works. It doesn't work for anyone with honor and dignity, but the "It's all about me"people don't care about that. They just care about themselves.