Ray’s own great-grandfather Samuel McGregor was a cattleman. He had been a remittance man from near Greenock, Scotland—a city west of Glasgow. He settled in British Columbia in 1913, and Ray’s family had been there ever since. Ray had two sisters, Rhiannon and Janelle. While Janelle and her husband, Jacob, ran a hardware store in Tavares, Florida, Rhiannon had moved with her family to the Philippines to do missionary work.
The last e-mail that Ray sent to Rhiannon before Internet service was disrupted read:
Dear Rhi:
Things are getting bad here, even in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I parlayed the last of my cash into food and fuel. The inflation is so crazy that to wait just one day would mean that I’d only get half as many groceries for my money.
I talked with Mom and Dad, via Skype. (I’m not sure how it is in the P.I., but here in the U.S. the phone lines are getting flaky AND are jammed with calls.) Dad said that they are doing okay, but they sound befuddled by the economic situation. Dad asked me for advice on finding a stock that would be safe to invest in. Ha! I suggested putting all of their remaining cash in food, fuel, salt blocks, baling twine, and ammo.
My old friend Phil Adams told me that I need to “Get Out of Dodge,” ASAP. The plan is for Phil to meet me at the ranch. I’m not sure if I can get enough fuel to get out West though. I think I can trade some ammo for fuel… I also have a few silver dimes and quarters, but those are effectively now my life savings. (They are now worth a fortune, at least in terms of the Funny Money U.S. Dollar.)
I’ll be praying for both you and Janelle and your families.
3
DAILY GRIND
Of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety…. The truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty…. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim…. The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.
After serving in the military, Megan LaCroix did her best to keep everything in perspective. It was amazing what conditions a human being could get used to. The right wheel well of the Ford 350 Econoline that she was riding in always prevented her from really getting comfortable on the long vanpool commute from Charles Town, West Virginia, to Fort Meade, Maryland. By the time she hit Frederick, Maryland, she could think only of how incompatible her long legs were with the van. But on days that she did not have to drive, the front passenger seat did offer a power port to plug in her old clunker Toshiba laptop. Megan would access her favorite blogs before leaving the house in the morning and then save them in a date-indexed folder for that day so that she could read up on the blogs and news feeds that she liked, such as the Paratus Familia blog, Patrice Lewis of Rural-Revolution.com, ChrisMartenson.com, and others. Most of her news links came from the DrudgeReport.com, and that particular morning took her a few extra precious minutes to get all the news feeds on Governor Martin O’Malley’s new Comprehensive Safe Citizens Firearm Safety Act, which had caught her attention. Even though she was not a Maryland resident, she did work in that state and ultimately it was its restrictive gun laws that caused her and her former husband, Eric, to choose Kearneysville, West Virginia, as a place to put down roots and raise their family. It was the early 2000s when they were first stationed at Fort Meade/NSA-Washington (NSA-W) together, and they wanted to live away from the hustle and bustle of the Beltway where gas was only $1.43 a gallon and credit was easy.
Megan was a former Marine, and while in the USMC she had been a Marine Corps intelligence specialist. Her career started out rough with an unexpected emergency leave during boot camp, but she quickly excelled in her MOS during her first duty station at Company I in NSA-Hawaii. It was there that she had met Eric Turner, a Navy CTR3. After they’d gotten married and started their family in Hawaii, their respective career detailers assigned them both to Fort Meade, Maryland, otherwise known as NSA-Washington. This was the headquarters of the NSA. Megan was assigned to Company B and continued to progress professionally as an analyst.
Now life was much different for her; she was divorced, a single mom of two young boys, and she was underwater with her home’s value. When her lease was up on her BMW 325i she simplified her life by buying a 1996 Honda Accord for two thousand dollars cash. The car seemed like it always needed something, but despite its multiple kinks would always start up, thanks largely to the maintenance and repair work of Malorie LaCroix, her younger sister.
Although it went against her nature, Megan eventually stopped paying her mortgage. She had tried to communicate with her bank, Bank of America, but they were impervious to working with her at all. So she got their attention the only way people could before the Crunch, by mailing them her house keys. Megan still kept up on the taxes and made sure that the power bill got paid, but she didn’t feel bad about no longer paying the mortgage. By then Bank of America was essentially a “federal utility.”
The federal government tipped over the critical domino that would lead to the inevitable Crunch with the passing of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) Act. This essentially threw open the doors of the U.S. Treasury and the banking cartel would “plus up” all the bottom lines of their franchise constituents. Banks were no longer concerned with meeting the bottom line; they had access to the tap where the money comes out and “too big to fail” meant all the new “wholly owned subsidiaries” were indeed getting theirs.
The Fed chairman was running the printing press in high gear while the Treasury secretary was trying to find a higher gear yet. Between the two of them they perpetuated their predecessors’ invention. One Beltway pundit called it “Ben and Tim’s self-licking ice cream cone.” This was a monetization scheme euphemistically called Quantitative Easing, wherein one part of the government sold its debt to the other part of the government. It was an ongoing travesty that far eclipsed the brief Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disasters. The American people, for the most part, lay down for it, and although there was substantive pushback from conservative and libertarian pundits, few elected officials were willing to stop the music. It was, after all, creating a semblance of a “recovery,” and the stock market was soaring.
As the commuter van cruised along, Megan read up on the new gun-grab legislation. “Here I am commuting two hours each way and barely making ends meet, and MOM wants to grab more guns from law-abiding citizens. Soon only the criminals will be able to carry guns,” she mumbled to herself.
Chuck, the man whose turn it was to drive that morning, heard her speaking and said, “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Megan replied, “I was just talking to myself.” She knew better than to open that can of worms with Chuck. Chuck was a committed liberal who had searched on eBay to find a “Kerry-Edwards” sticker to round out the “Hope and Change” motif he had on the back of his Toyota Prius.