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he just wished that he could preserve, could drag out, just for a few more days, weeks, or months the precious time all fathers remember fondly, when they still had their “little girl.”
“We finally figured out that when you set off a nuke in space, that’s when the EMP effect really kicks in, as the energy burst hits the upper atmosphere. It becomes like a pebble triggering an avalanche, the electrical disturbances magnifying. It’s in the report. It’s called the ‘Compton Effect.’
“The enemy will never attack you where you are strongest. … He will attack where you are weakest. If you do not know your weakest point, be certain, your enemy will,” Charlie said.
To put it coldly, my friends, all the ones who should have died years ago, would have died years ago without beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, pacemakers, exotic medications, well, now they’re dying all at once.”
They don’t know how to survive without a society that supports them even as they curse it or rebel against it.”
She’d always talk about how great Gandhi was. I’d tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he’d have been dead in a second, his name forgotten.”
Scale of social order, he thought. The larger the group, the more likely it was that it would fragment under stress, with a few in power looking out for themselves first.
America is like an exotic hothouse plant. It can only live now in the artificial environment of vaccinations, sterilization, and antibiotics we started creating a hundred or more years ago.
We were spoiled unlike any generation in history, and we forgot completely just how dependent we were on the juice flowing through the wires, the buttons doing something when we pushed them.
Suppose the old America, so wonderful, the country we so loved, suppose at four fifty p.m. eighteen days ago, it died. It died from complacency, from blindness, from not being willing to face the harsh realities of the world. Died from smug self-centeredness. Suppose America died that day.”
Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional test kit for Jennifer, damn it, even birth control for Elizabeth, dog food, a water filter so they didn’t have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool … I should have had those on hand.
