The perfect example of this was Steve’s nephew, Phil McGuire. He drifted through high school without ever having a summer job or working after school, much to Steve’s chagrin. But it was rare before the Collapse for teenagers to work; they needed time to play video games and text their friends. Phil fit into this category perfectly. After high school graduation, he couldn’t find a job, but he didn’t really try to find one. He lived with his mom, Steve’s sister, and her boyfriend. When he turned eighteen, he was told about all the free stuff he could get, including the magical EBT card. It was free money and he didn’t have to do anything to get it. He spent the next few years on the couch at his mom’s house and having a carefree life.
When the Collapse hit, he was bewildered that he couldn’t sit on the couch and get everything given to him. At first, he was mad. Steve told him that life had changed, but “Uncle Steve” was just being his hard ass self, Phil thought.
But slowly, Phil started volunteering for various jobs. Steve took him under his wing. He had to teach Phil how to work. He had to teach him to get up on time, to wear work clothes, and to actually get a job done. Phil would constantly want to take a break after working a few minutes. He had no concept of finishing a job; he was just putting time in and thought he got credit for just showing up. “We don’t quit until the job is done,” Steve would have to tell him.
Phil improved considerably in the fall. By Christmas, Steve could tell him to do a project and it got done, always slowly and sometimes poorly, but Phil was finally putting in true effort. His transformation was complete when, after Christmas, Steve told him to split and stack firewood for an elderly neighbor lady and, to Steve’s pleasant surprise, the job was done before dark, with no supervision from Steve. Phil seemed much happier because, for the first time in his life, he was productive. He had finally grown up and was a man.
Like so many other things during the Collapse, the good, like Phil’s transformation, came with the other side of the coin, the bad, like all the people dying of simple illnesses that winter.
The big concern in town was the all the deaths from pneumonia and the flu. People were so run down, especially the elderly, and were cold and weren’t getting the nutrition they needed. All the stress from the Collapse also degraded their immune systems. Little colds were turning into full-on serious illnesses and there were no antibiotics. Steve was going to way too many funerals lately. Including that of Grant’s mom.
The talk at the latest funeral Steve went to was about how the Patriots supposedly took Olympia on New Year’s Day. Steve listened politely and was rooting for the Patriots, if the stories were true. But, Steve hated to admit, he didn’t really care. Whoever sat in some capitol building 150 miles away in Olympia wouldn’t affect whether people in Forks had enough to eat this winter or could treat a simple cold before it became pneumonia. Governments didn’t really matter anymore in Forks.
Chapter 313
Dmitri’s Rules for Gray Manning
In west Seattle, Ed Oleo had been staying under the radar all fall. He and Dmitri talked a lot about being a “gray man.” Back in the fall, Dmitri gave Ed a lesson in “gray manning” — lessons Ed was putting into place just before midnight on the day after New Year’s.
Dmitri was a gold mine of information about how to be a gray man, like he had been in the former Soviet Union. Dmitri’s people had gray manning down to a science, which, in large part, was why the Soviet Union collapsed.
The first rule of gray manning, Dmitri explained, was to be and remain gray — that is, to blend in and not alert the authorities that you are resisting them. A gray man or woman can’t do the resistance any good if he or she is in jail because he or she decided to spout off about politics or some other waste of time in a repressive regime. “There is no upside and much downside,” Dmitri said, using his favorite American businessman’s phrase, “to openly making political statements” during the Collapse. Several people in TDFs learned this the hard way. Anonymously making political statements, like the “I miss America” graffiti Dmitri and Ed were seeing in Seattle, was a different story, Dmitri explained. “Don’t let the authorities know it is you making the statement,” he would say. “Let them, and especially the general population, think it is everyone making the statement.”
The second rule of gray manning, Dmitri explained to Ed, was to not try to do too much. “It is not up to you,” Dmitri, “to take down the system. It cannot be done by one person.” Instead, Dmitri explained, “the system was built by many people, and needs many people to sustain it.” This meant, “It takes many people to bring it down.” Dmitri would laugh and tell Ed, “You Americans care so much about the individual. You think individuals can do anything. That is true of some things, but you are wrong about an individual being able to take down the system. It takes many gray men to bring it down.”
The third rule of gray manning, Dmitri said, was to use the system against itself. For example, if the system requires a person to submit an application to do something, like have a garage sale, then submit an application. The system will spend its resources processing the application. By spending a little time to submit an application, a gray man can cause the system to spend much more time and energy processing it. Don’t complain out loud that you shouldn’t have to have a permit to hold a garage sale, he would say, “Send in the application and let them work on it. Let all the problems they create for you become their problems.”
The fourth rule was to do everything possible to strengthen alternatives to the system. The best example was the black market. It competed with the official system, so the stronger the black market was, the weaker the system was. This was one of the things about gray manning that directly benefited the gray man: the black market often had things the system could not provide.
The fifth rule was to notice things.
“Just keep your eyes open,” Dmitri said, “and notice little things.” Dmitri gave examples like when the police changed shifts, when your neighbors came and went, when the stores had food and when they didn’t. “All of these things will help you make a plan to do things, like sabotage, and they are also useful pieces of information to tell allied forces when they arrive.”
“Sabotage is the next rule,” Dmitri said. “You know the phrase, ‘throw a monkey wrench?’”
“Sure,” Ed said, “it means to destroy something.”
“My people invented that phrase,” Dmitri said with pride. “It came from the industrialization period in the Soviet Union when resisters would actually throw a wrench into machinery and destroy it. It was impossible to know which worker did it. And it would take weeks to fix the machinery. This cost the system a tremendous amount and also stopped production for weeks. All for the price of a wrench, thrown into a machine anonymously.”