by pedalling_faster » Sun 22 Oct 2006, 16:06:40
there's a movie with Michael Douglas where he plays a laid-off defense worker and kind of goes postal.
John Q, the movie with Denzel Washington - he plays a normal father who holds up a hospital to get his son a heart surgery.
both movie characters are normal good citizens who got overwhelmed by circumstances.
* the stress of having a family to feed & no job to feed them with
* the additional stress of loss of health care & diminished access to things that help us deal with the stress (peppermint candy, Valium; at least one you can get without a prescription !)
* the stress of being homeless with a family
now multiply by 100 million.
some of those people (Americans) will be going quite berserk and will need a place to stay.
that's who the camps are for - Americans Gone Wild. what people on this online community refer to as Zombies.
well, that and the Muslims who are unfortunate enough to get caught in the cross-fire.
- - -
in San Diego i worked with a guy named Larry T. at an electronics company in 1990. the one time i needed his help, to get all the cables & function generators for some EMI testing, he was super helpful. took 20 minutes away from his manufacturing tech. duties to help out the R&D engineer.
Larry got laid off. he came back in 3 months later with guns and dynamite. killed a VP of manufacturing and a sales guy from New Jersey.
he did have a wife and kids. that's how he responded to the stress.
among the engineering rank-and-file, there was very little sympathy for the VP of manufacturing.
how many Larry's will there be when TSHTF ?
when i see friends that i worked with at that company, sometimes we talk about visiting Larry in prison. he was not an asshole co-worker. he was a normal co-worker who took at his frustrations on the VP of manufacturing, who was an asshole.
the company had been through an LBO where 5 managers bought the company for $17 million, then sold it to an English company for $40 million.
they did all sorts of wild gyrations to make the company look appealing to the buyer. like bid jobs way under cost, so that there was a big backlog.
after the sale, they tried to back out of a few of the contracts. one in particular with the Israeli Defense Forces. IDF threatened to sue. so the managers turned around and said, "you guys have 3 months to do 9 months worth of work".
that was the environment i was recruited into.
Larry T. worked on that 9/3 month job. the VP of manufacturing was the primary slave-driver, the manager who led the morning staff meetings.
it was quite a show.