East Palestine as a table top exercise

The train derailment/ toxic cloud/acid rain cluster in Ohio is a tragedy, but it offers an opportunity to assess your own abilities. Imagine, for moment, that is you at ground zero. The air is now poison, as is the ground. Maybe utilities are still on for now, but you absolutely cannot stay put. Ergo, most of your physical preps are toast. So much for a deep freeze and solar panels. You have, essentially, what you can carry.

Now lets also imagine that it isn’t 2023, but is just a bit further in the future. The Federal governments control is less, and Cartel type criminal organizations are common. You have to go, but you are really not welcome anywhere else. Resources are thin for everyone, and charity for other mouths to feed is nonexistent.

Do you have the strength to move out with what you can carry ( on your back or in a car, I really don’t care which), and resettle in what is likely to be a hostile environment? It can be ethnic, it can just be you aren’t from around here, accent, whatever you like.

I’m not talking about the force of arms to conquer. That is an entirely different thing. I mean merely the force required to carve out a hovel to live in, among people that don’t like you on principle.

This was the reality for European tribes many time throughout history. German barbarians faced with the unbeatable Hun army to their rear, forcing migration into Roman turf. Dorians perhaps in to ancient Greece. Most likely the Sea People during the Bronze Age collapse.

Without the strength to conquer, you may still be able to project enough force to become a buffer people. Someone it isn’t worth attacking so long as you stay put, as long as it is also obvious you will be the front line against other refugees. Which is a precarious position.

Another outcome- do you have the tactical acumen and observation skills to know who you can pick off without inviting an overwhelming response? You could go to Juarez today and conduct home invasions all day, so long as you picked the right houses. But God help you the minute you pick the wrong one. There will always be those with status, and those without. In such a situation, it is entirely plausible you could take resources from those not under the direct protection of such a Cartel. So long as it didn’t look like an attempted invasion, nor you were getting to rich. Both of which would easily invite a heavy handed response.

In that case, could you correctly pick the right targets that would allow you to pass across a foreign land? Having long since run out of supplies, could you do what was needed to ensure the survivability of yours?

And while you were doing so, could you also project enough strength that the local vultures didn’t just pick you off for your meager possessions? Long enough to traverse the land to a place that you could carve off a new place to live? And once you were there, would you have the power to hold it together long enough to resettle and rebuild?

That, friends, is the definition of tribal strength. And while it might be uncomfortable to think about, it’s very more normal existence for human beings that our last 200 years, by far.