You have to love Friday Night on the Discovery Channel, my favorite of the Survival shows is Beyond Survival featuring Les Stroud.
Les takes us on epic journey’s and he goes to places where the “locals” are tribes of people living the way they have been living for 1000’s of years. Some tribes only recently discovered having thought to be extinct.
Today we went with Les to Madagascar. Here is the theme that I always notice in these shows. The tribesman always work together as a group to feed the tribe, the tribesman always work together to help build the huts of other tribesman. In a tribal environment there seems to be a sense of community responsibility that’s hands on. It forces you to notice that the “civilized” way of just throwing money at people is backwards.
I have enjoyed primitive craft all my life and I am not talking about painting pictures or making cute necklaces. The primitive way of living, we call it survival, they call it life and there life is dying as we civilized people fish the seas dry, hunt the animals to extinction. With all our abundance, where / when did we forget that we are a tribe? That we have brothers and sisters? I am not talking about reaching to these tribesman and building them a well, or a school house, a church, or anything, really they are fine. I am talking about when are we going to stop sticking our nose in their business, and look across the street of our own front doors and notice we have a neighbor.
On HGTV they just had a show the “greatest handyman” I thought that show was BS as well. All they did was build things. I have done handyman work on and off my whole life, and I never built anything. Most of the time it was changing light bulbs for little old ladies, or fixing a running toilet, very simple stuff that they used to be able to do for themselves. More importantly to the whole handyman experience was the time I spent listening to them tell there stories, knowing how important it was for them to just have someone who would listen, even if they are being paid to be there. If they needed some roofing done they would call a roofer not a handyman. Let me get back on point, most of the customers I helped, I wound up doing the work for little to no money, these are our neighbors, people who just need to be noticed, if you would take the time to care about one neighbor, if everyone would take the time to take care of just one neighbor, just think what a difference that would make. Don’t limit your vision to just single moms, and the elderly, if you open your eyes and your heart, you will find a lot of people in need, right in your own neighborhood.
Survival shows make survival look fun, survival is not fun. The most dangerous part of survival is depression and the psychological effects being in a dangerous situation can have on you.
Don’t you think your neighbor who can only afford to eat one .88 cent TV dinner a day does not view his existence just as desperate as someone lost in the wilderness.
I have a theory about where we have gone wrong as a society, we view depression in other people as a disease to be cured with a pill, not as a sign that they are in trouble and need a friend, that they are no longer capable of self rescue.
In a survival situation the only reason you should ever move is if you know for a fact that no rescue is coming. The choice to stay or self rescue in a survival situation occurs before the effects of dehydration and starvation kick in, in other words while you are still healthy. I assure you in a survival situation that if you get to a point of depression so sever that you can no longer self rescue, you will die. If your neighbor is that depressed, they will die, if you don’t help. So why do you act surprised when you hear about your neighbor passing away?
Now that I have totally left the grid from where I started I better get off my soapbox.
Hearing someone cry “I want to live” sometimes is a call for help and maybe you don’t own a strong enough rope, but aren’t you part of a tribe?
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