Are you watching Revolution on Sky1 HD? I have to admit, I’m hooked! The series is a post apocalyptic American world where the cities are empty, militias rule and control the food supply and weapons, and no-one knows why the electricity went out.
It is incredibly gripping and now I know the characters, I’m right behind them, waiting to see what else is uncovered as the story unfolds. It is brilliant entertainment, but it also has a serious message. What on earth would we all do if the power went out? Just think, if we couldn’t go to the shop (because it had been looted) and buy food (because there weren’t the trucks on the road to deliver it), we had no elecrticity to cook our food (we’d have to catch it ourselves and cook on an open campfire), if starving masses who couldn’t or wouldn’t catch their own food muscled in to steal yours out of the mouths of your children, if the normal rules of civilised society were abandoned as people were frightened and panicked. What would we do?
It is stories like this that make you count your many blessings. The fact that you are reading this on the internet means that you have access to a computer, electricity, a roof over your head. You have the free time to read it and don’t have to spend every second hunting or foraging or literally watching your back as you are absorbed in an activity. The fact that I’m writing this means that I have access to a computer, electricity, free time to do something creative, my own platform on the internet to say what I want to say and freedom of speech. We have many blessings and every week as I watch the latest episode, I’m reminded of that.
I think the show is so compelling is because there is a seed of possibility in there. One day this could, potentially, happen to us. It is fiction but it could be real. What if we were transported back to the Wild West when we used horses for transport and the people we interacted with were right in front of us and not spread across the globe? It would be survival of the fittest. Those that had the ability to live in a sustainable way would do so but they’d also need the physical and mental strength too to defend what they have. The weakest would die, the strongest would survive.
Sustainable living is something that many of us are trying to do now, reducing our reliance on electrical power consumption and finding new ways to eat – maybe even growing our own food. We are not a green fingered family and our amateur efforts last year to grow vegetables yielded absolutely nothing! But I admire people who can produce – it’s a skill.
The idea of living off grid appeals to me, to sustain and reproduce my lifestyle without outside reliance but I know that other than installing solar panels like the ones here in the future, or trying again with the veg growing – (I’d really like to be successful at this!) I’m still only dipping a toe in. I do buy organic and I recycle what can be recycled but I haven’t taken myself fully off the radar yet.
…That is, unless the lights go out.
Disclosure: This is a featured post.
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