Tuesday, April 28, 2009

When the economy collapses, murder/suicide isn't the answer

When the economy collapses, murder/suicide isn't the answer

In recent months I have heard about quite a few murder/suicides that were blamed on the "bad economy".

Is that how people react to a bad economy? Is that the proper response to a lost job? Why kill former co-workers? Why kill family and self? These desperate individuals can't think of a way to survive without money? Has dependency become so pervasive that there is no self-sufficiency in individuals anymore?

Not too many people still have the skills to make do with what they have anymore. Take a lesson from survivors of the previous "Great Depression". Are you willing to find alternative foods? (and I'm not necessarily talking about a previously discussed source). There are books and websites that can help you learn skills to ease a lack of money. Use the money you have (or earn in a lower-paying job) for those things that there is no alternative way of getting. Learn to barter. Grow a garden (what good is a lawn?). Raise chickens and goats. Trade skills with others. If you still really need help, ask for charity; don't go to the state for "welfare". One is moral; the other is "receiving stolen property".

While you have the right to end your own life if you want to, you have no right to make that decision for anyone else who isn't attacking you. Just because you see no way out, it doesn't mean that others are in the same boat. Tomorrow you might be in a better mood and realize that it isn't the end of the world unless you do the dirty work yourself.

Just remember that in a bad economy you are losing things that the majority of humans, for the vast majority of our existence as a species, have done pretty well without. I realize that the state makes life without these things more difficult than they need to be (and often "illegal"; "poaching" is an example), but that is a strike against the legitimacy of the state, not evidence of your "failure" as a person. Shrug off any guilt at breaking the counterfeit "laws" of the state, while abiding by the ZAP, and you still have a chance of doing pretty well.

Killing your family isn't the answer. Killing your former co-workers isn't (usually) the answer. Remember, unless you kill them during an attack on you, you are just "getting revenge", which is always wrong, whether done as an individual or as a society.