by John Young "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert A. Heinlein http://www.wvwnews.net/downloads/audio/john_young/jy20071209.mp3. When these factors combine we can reasonably expect ethnic violence, a large amount of which will be focused against our people, a declining standard of living accompanied by resource scarcity, and an increasingly totalitarian government working in tandem with corporations. It is in such times that an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to economics, ethics and psychology will make all the difference. Rest assured we at European Americans United have plans to turn future events to the advantage of our organizational objectives and our people. And when the time comes, our members must stand ready to do their part, whatever that may be. But they should suffer under no apocalyptic delusions that in the wake of serious economic disruptions we would automatically “seize power.” Not only is that not in the plans, or at least not in the way most folks would think of it; but that sort of vision severely underestimates the strength of the government and its partisans. Our objectives, all of them, are clearly defined and reasonably achievable. There is no benefit to waiting around for some economic collapse to “save us” when it could accomplish quite the opposite. But until then, and in large measure in preparation for that time, we need to start focusing on self-sufficiency as a mind-set that integrates all three disciplines in a fashion that will advance our goals. I want to draw an important distinction here between the self-sufficiency I am describing and the mind-set of survivalism. Survivalism is about hunkering down and hiding out until a crisis passes. This approach is inapplicable to the long economic downturn we will likely face, because it is oriented toward using the artifacts of a past era to support a limited number of people for a relatively short time. Worse, far too often survivalism emphasizes stocking up on substantial armament, putting away preserved foods that can’t be regenerated and being paranoid about anyone who happens to wander into one’s field of fire. This mindset is based on an extreme application of life-boat ethics in which ordinarily unthinkable acts are seen as justifiable. Clearly, it is a mindset that can cause survivalists to become a real and present danger to anyone near them. On the other hand, self-sufficiency means being able to grow and raise your own food, not merely paying big bucks for dehydrated rations that will eventually run out. Self-sufficiency means possessing the skills and knowledge to turn raw materials into tools, furniture, entertainment and the necessities of life. A self-sufficient person has something to offer in interactions with his community so that he is an asset moving toward the future. In the future, the more self-sufficient you become, the less reliant you will be on an unstable economy and the more you will have to offer your neighbors in terms of mutually beneficial exchange. The greater your range of capabilities, the more valuable you will be to your community. Increased levels of self-sufficiency are to be the goal of all EAU members. This distinction can also be seen as a distinction between what you have as opposed to who and what you are. Concentrating mainly on what you have, how to protect it, and in the worst case, how to take it away from others is a continuation of the materialistic concept held in common between capitalism and communism, and utterly alien to the potential for nobility that lies within us all. It takes the core premises of homo economicus that have led to the sickness pervading our current society, and enshrines them in a round of AR-15 ammunition. It is far better to concentrate on a process of self-overcoming in which you constantly learn more and become more capable. You become more valuable to your community in an ever-widening symbiosis in which honorable behavior is better than cash. This, then, is the polar opposite of the capitalist and communist values that see man solely as an economic being. In this sense, then, our ethics are the basis for a revolution in the thinking and psychology of our Folk. Not only do they assist in the realization of our nobility and ultimate goals, but they serve as an inoculation against the ideas and lies of the globalists. Starting with ourselves, we are inculcating a value system worthy of our ancestors and necessary for our posterity to achieve its potential. Our ethics and value systems are memes — units of cultural transmission — that have the power to spread and transform our society for the better. I covered the subject of memes in the Spring 2007 membership bulletin, but for folks who joined after, a thumbnail sketch is in order. Memes are like genes, except they transmit cultural mores, expectations and values. In a sense, what genes do for the body, memes do for the mind. Genes are the hardware, and memes are the software. Until the modern age of mass-brainwashing through mass-media and government-owned education, memes largely evolved in tandem with a homogenous people and contained the elements of culture which had proven advantageous to that culture in the long run — a form of time-tested cultural wisdom. Like a gene, a meme must be either innocuous or advantageous to persist among a people for a long period of time. Memes that prove to be a disadvantage ultimately fail and are replaced. The age of mass communication and individual isolation in which we have been living created a circumstance in which memes that were foreign to our people, and even harmful to us, could be inserted by the controllers of the mass media. As reports of any adverse consequences of those memes could be suppressed, and any positive affects could be exaggerated, the normal mechanism of discrimination between harmful and beneficial memes was bypassed. Likewise, especially with the dawn of the television age, the natural respect we have for authority and our social tendency to conformity were used against us as we spent more time in front of the tube, and less time associating with real people. According to Ron Kaufman, the human mind lacks the ability to distinguish between memories of actual experiences and visual memories inserted through television. Thus, the implied and explicit attitudes of characters in television shows have increasingly formed the social memories that were previously provided by interactions with real people. In addition, studies have shown that the attitudes, mores and values that are portrayed as favorable in television characters have a pronounced peer-pressure effect, leading ironically to social conformity to characters who aren’t even real. (1) In this way, harmful memes with absolutely no origin in our actual culture have become widely accepted by our people. That explains how the memes that have contributed to self-obsession, materialistic shallowness, higher-than-acceptable divorce rates, intermarriage and worse have replaced the actual memes of our native culture in less than 70 years. But now for the good news. People are getting their news from the Internet like never before, and our news site has among the highest Alexa ratings of any site of its type. But there’s even better news. Cable bills are increasing at more than double the rate of inflation, and as we enter a recession, more people are choosing food over TV, and their TV is getting cut at the pole. By next year, the average cable bill will top $100 per month. Ironically, people will pay the cable bill before the mortgage because of the addictive qualities of the medium; but ultimately they’ll be prioritizing, and their 200 high-definition channels of garbage will have to go. With that missing, they’ll find other ways to fill their time, including real interactions with real live people, including YOU. With the brainwashing box turned off, the most powerful tool for social manipulation ever invented will play a less important role in people’s lives. Instead of seeing a mediated reality, they’ll see an unfiltered reality through their own eyes. Instead of sitcom characters serving as a peer group to enforce ideological conformity, they’ll be interacting with their family, their friends and their neighbors, including us. And with a much tighter family budget, they’ll need to do a lot of things themselves. Those of us who have already gotten a head start on self-sufficiency skills will become mentors in this regard, commanding respect and influence. And in this way, though not only in this way, we will start spreading our own, more positive and suitable memes. And those memes will spread among a population that is ready for something better. And our population most assuredly needs something better. Notwithstanding the shiny veneer of material prosperity predominating American consumerist culture, there is a massive undercurrent of mental anguish among our people letting us know in stark terms that all is not well. It is estimated that, in 2000, over 750,000 Americans attempted suicide. While not all succeeded, it is now the eighth leading cause of death among adults, and the third largest cause of death among teens, having tripled for young men since the 1960’s. The incidence of depression in our country has increased between ten-fold and twenty-fold since 1950, and during that time the average age of onset of symptoms has dropped from 29.5 to between 14 and 15.(2) If current trends continue, the World Health Organization has predicted that depression will soon become the world’s second largest cause of debility, after heart disease. (3) As we earlier described the attitudinal difference between survivalism and self-sufficiency being the difference between having and being; researchers into the depression epidemic are concluding that the depression and suicide epidemics we are experiencing are caused by hyper-materialistic social mores that ignore everything in human beings that can’t be measured and put on a ledger sheet. As one researcher described matters, "Depression and its myriad allied disorders are symptoms of a society that has lost its way, forcing us to live in a manner inimical to our human, genetic nature …" (4) Another researcher pointed out something much more important: "The faith encouraged by consumer culture is a faith in money, technology, and consumer products, and it is a faith that often has significant adverse side effects, including addiction and withdrawal. Americans who don’t share the faith of such a culture will likely feel alienated from society, and alienation—from either one’s humanity or one’s surroundings— is painful and can be a source of depression. I believe that many people feel alienated in consumer culture …" (5) During the stock market crash of the last Depression, people hurled themselves from windows because they had lost their fortunes. They had come to see the only value they could offer their families or communities to be in their wallets. As the federal Ponzi scheme and peak oil collide, massive unemployment can be expected. Maintaining such a materialistic mindset could very realistically lead to suicide. That is not to say that you shouldn’t seek to gain wealth. By all means, because it can be to your benefit and that of your community, seek it. But put wealth in perspective, and do not seek it to the exclusion of other important values such as your honor. If you elevate wealth as your supreme value, you will be psychologically crippled if you lose it, and you will likewise lose other important values in its pursuit. In addition, you should see the wealth you acquire as a means of improving the lives of your family, your loved ones, and your people as a whole. In all of the lore of our people going back thousands of years, wealth has always been seen to be worthwhile only when honorably acquired and used to the benefit of the community. You can always earn more money, but when you lose integrity and honor in the eyes of your loved ones, that isn’t so easily redeemed. Something to keep in mind is that a booming economy can easily cover the flaws in the values that our people have been fed by protecting people from what would otherwise be the immediately disastrous results of those values. Folks can hide away in suburbs far away from ethnic violence, and they can collect bigger paychecks in exchange for neglecting their families and mouthing the requisite politically correct formulas. And those bigger paychecks can buy them approval in the eyes of their peers with fancy cars, clever gadgets, digital entertainment and mountains of material things that ultimately have no transcendent value. But when the rug is pulled out from under the economy, all of the artificial inducements that serve to disguise the glaring flaws in the prevailing value system fed to us by the ministers of the status quo will have to stop. This will serve to make our wider folk more receptive to our message while simultaneously bringing the full force of the laws of cause and effect to bear upon them for decisions they have made pursuant to false beliefs. Naturally, if depression and suicide rates are tied to a consumerist and materialistic value system as the experts have determined, imagine the darkness that will descend on many of our people in the depths of an economic depression. Back during the Great Depression, the phenomenon of suicide due to the stock crash was not particularly widespread beyond Wall Street and related environs. But in today’s America, EVERY street is Wall Street. The memes propagated by the social deconstructionists who own our media can’t fix that problem — they can only make it worse. But the memes that we will be passing, memes that concentrate on the integrated capacity of human beings to be better every day than they were the day before, and how the nobility of a man is far more important than his checking account will quite literally save lives. Even if the government mandated giving TV away for free, an idea not entirely out of the question, the commercial nature of the medium itself as it has been constructed effectively prevents it from being a positive force to convey better memes. And in the midst of an economic depression, the more affected a particular person is by the idiot box, the more despondent and suicidal he will become. Despondency and suicidal thoughts are self-reinforcing without an active intervention, and effectively prevent positive action. By contrast, those of our folk who pick up on our memes will be at a decided survival advantage. They will be happier, more engaged in proactive planning and effort and more connected to their families and communities. In other words, the coming economic crisis will create, for the first time in a century, an ideal circumstance for the propagation of our vital culture-building memes. The memes spread by the slippery ones will put most people who adopt them at a distinct survival disadvantage; while ours will put people at an advantage. So the conditions will be right, and we must be prepared in advance to assume the leadership roles we will be taking in our neighborhoods, because it is through advanced preparation that those leadership roles will become ours by default. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we’re going to fill it. Each and every one of us, the members of European Americans United, is an avatar of the Folk-soul of our people. In that sense, no matter where we are, we represent the boundaries of our nation. WE are the borders, and the defenders of those borders. We carry within us the archetypal knowledge of all that has been, and the seeds for all that will be. Because of this, many of us are already leaders in our neighborhoods and workplaces in various degrees; and with the upcoming economic crisis, we will assume further roles of mentorship and leadership. And through those roles we will spread the core life-affirming memes of the true culture of our people, and expand the borders of our nation even further. I’m not going to be overly-optimistic here. It is difficult to overcome a lifetime of brainwashing, and many people will never see things our way. Perhaps even a substantial majority. But the implementation of our plans, and substantially advancing our objectives, only requires a few tens of thousands. And those sorts of numbers will be easily achieved through the combination of our dedicated members and the economic environment that will prevail. So now let’s talk about self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is manifested in a set of attitudes and skills more than in material goods; though various material goods can certainly help. The core ideas are to eliminate debt, avoid consumerism, make necessary purchases with an eye towards the best interests of our people, establish distinctive standards in our professions, adopt hobbies that enhance our self-sufficiency and bring in additional income, and learn to supply as many of our own basic necessities as possible at minimal cost. You should seek now to aggressively pay down any debt you may have. Debt, even in the best of times, limits your options and puts an anchor around your neck by obligating months or years of your productive life to people you have never met. It is a leading cause of divorce and children growing up in fatherless homes. But when you’ve been downsized in a recession and the debt can’t be paid, it can result in outright homelessness. Let there be no mistake, the laws in this country favor lenders, not you, and they have a host of legal tools at their disposal to get what’s theirs. Even without a looming recession, you should be maintaining as little debt as possible; but with the upcoming depression failure to retire your debt is suicidal. There are simple and easily implemented methods for retiring your debts that I’ll cover in an upcoming article on Western Voices World News, so keep an eye out for it. Do not expect debt forgiveness to come from Congress on a large scale. Such relief would de-fund the banking system overnight, collapse the currency, and bring the entire economy to a stand-still. Notice that the relief coming from Congress for the current record-setting foreclosures takes the form of new loans at better interest rates to retire the old loans, it is NOT coming in the form of cancellation of debt. Likewise, recent reforms of bankruptcy laws have effectively denied bankruptcy protection to millions of people. Big Daddy Congress isn’t going to save you, so you must save yourself by minimizing or eliminating as much debt as possible starting as soon as possible. At the same time, you should avoid the purchase of goods made in China and Japan whenever possible. Check labels and look for alternatives. A good portion of the expansion of China’s need for oil comes from American demand for their products. Ultimately, that comes at the cost of the loss of American jobs but more importantly sets us on a collision course for military conflict over scarce energy resources. Buying Chinese and Japanese goods also provides the central banks of those countries with the money they need in order to buy the bonds that fund our national debt. (It is by selling these bonds that our Federal Reserve is able to diminish the inflationary pressures related to deficit spending. It’s another method of postponing the bad results of current actions into an indefinite future.) Just these two countries own nearly half of our national debt. Our government shouldn’t be acting so irresponsibly, and we can’t expect politicians to exercise constraint voluntarily; but tightening Asia’s purse by refusing to buy their products will force constraint on our own politicians by limiting the salability of the bonds that finance the national debt. But more importantly, every dollar of the U.S. national debt that China and Japan are unable to buy is that much less influence they have over our economy and our national self-determination. If things keep going on their present course, ultimately these countries will be able to take the United States without firing a shot just by threatening to dump their dollar-denominated holdings. This is the real reason why the United States government is so sickeningly sweet to the totalitarians in Beijing who routinely murder citizens for exercising free speech. So already, the irresponsibility of politicians in Washington has severely compromised the moral integrity of our country. So do not buy Chinese and Japanese products, and encourage others to avoid buying them. Sometimes it may mean doing without, but ultimately it will benefit our extended kinship group. If you go to the "links" section on wvwnews.net, you will find links to web sites that will help you find American-made alternatives to Asian goods. Choose these instead — and create jobs for your friends and family. Speaking of jobs, you should endeavor to be the best at your profession that you can possibly be, no matter what that profession is. There is a certain pride that comes from a job well-done. This knowledge and pride is its own reward, but will have the practical benefit of making you less likely to receive a pink-slip when the layoffs come, and more capable of finding new employment if you are laid off. Employment security comes from being the best, and you should strive to be the best — no matter your profession. At the same time, you should strive to develop sources of income outside of regular employment so that your well-being is less dependent on factors beyond your control such as the job market, and more dependent upon factors that you can control. In the longer run, EAU, as an organization, plans to organize a method to facilitate trade among members. The problems we have encountered so far are matters of security and prioritization. That is to say, as a young organization we have many other things to accomplish first, and we also don’t want establish a system that inadvertently assists those who oppose our objectives simply because we are impatient. But in the future, we will establish a method where, whatever your needs, you can first check to see if that need can be fulfilled by a fellow EAU member. This will be important, because it will ultimately create a pattern of interlocking relationships among our membership that will give our members a survival advantage compared to the population at large. If you need a doctor, lawyer, plumber or even chicken manure; it is always best to obtain your needs from another person who shares your goals and values. And those people, in turn, will obtain their needs from you whenever possible. When it comes to this pattern of interlocking relationships, it used to be that practically everyone had the tools and knew basic carpentry, plumbing and machine repair. But today, especially near big cities, it isn’t unusual to meet grown men with important jobs who can’t change their brake pads. So now is the time to start a new hobby that can also bring in a second income, no matter how small. Find something that is interesting and enjoyable, and acquire the knowledge and tools required to pursue it. Your library has hundreds of books on these topics, and now is the time to start researching and get your feet wet by applying the skills. But don’t let my suggestions in this regard serve as a limitation. You can make soap, furniture, tools, computer software and a million other things depending upon your interests and abilities. My only caution in this regard is to realize that most people artificially limit themselves by assuming themselves to be far less capable than they really are. So don’t be afraid to stretch your wings and experiment. Developing these skills will give you a way of participating in the local economy outside of more specialized skills in traditional employment. Your next door neighbor may not need and actuarial analyst, but may need a desk for his daughter to do her homework. Another thing you need to do is start growing and preserving a substantial amount of your own food. Just over the past year food prices have grown at triple the rate of inflation. Dairy prices have increased by 15%, and egg prices have increased by 45%. Since the cost of energy has a tremendous impact on food prices, you can expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future. By having your own food supply on-hand, you won’t be forced to choose between heating your home and feeding your family. A number of agricultural methods have been developed that will allow suburban families on even a small lot to supply a lot of their own food. The Grow Biointensive, Square Foot and Mini Farming methods are easy, sustainable and organic. Look them up online. While you are reading about farming, you may decide you need to know even more about self-sufficiency. For that, the one book I recommend most highly is Storey’s Basic Country Skills. The book covers everything from butchering a hog to digging a well, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you aren’t growing your own food or can’t do so for some reason, it is important that you patronize local farmers and gardeners. In an era where shipping lettuce from California to New York will make it ruinously expensive due to fuel costs, you want to preserve and support these local growers because you’ll be needing them. Local produce will become less expensive than imported produce. Re-localization of agriculture will be crucial to avoid starvation and malnutrition. The Internet makes this easy. Go to www.localharvest.org, and you will find farms of all sorts within your local area. You can literally type in anything you need from chicken meat and soap to Jerusalem artichokes and find someone nearby who can supply your needs. If you produce more food than you can use, add your own enterprise to that list so other people can find you. This will augment your income from non-employment sources while reducing your dependence on the job market. Obviously, the lack of inexpensive transportation in the future means that your local community is going to become more important in your life than it has been for most of us for decades. For this reason, you not only need to have something to offer through self-sufficiency , but you should start paying attention now to where you are living and the quality of the people among whom you live. When I speak of quality, I’m not speaking strictly of race; though that can be a factor. I’m also not speaking of economic status, as rock stars routinely make more money than heart surgeons. I am mainly speaking of character. You’ll know it when you see it, and you should make sure wherever you live has the highest possible proportion of people of good character. In close communities where everyone will be dealing with each other regularly instead of locked up in their homes at night, the character of your neighbors will become extremely important. You should pay special attention to proximity to your near and extended family — parents, in-laws, sisters, cousins and so forth. Extended family has an already-established network of trust that can create a very beneficial economy of scale for endeavors like raising children and major projects. It creates a buffer so that you don’t need to individually own, personally, everything you might possibly need. Instead of five wood-splitters for five households, the five households in an extended family may only need one. The key to these beneficial economies lies in proximity, so take that factor into account when choosing a place to live. You should also start interacting more with your neighbors. Invite them over for a cook-out, bring them small home-made cakes for the holidays and maybe even share some of the bounty of your garden with them. Reciprocity is a powerful principle in human interaction, and you’ll be surprised at what your good-will gestures will generate. You want to be on good terms with your neighbors well before you are all relying on each other for survival, so don’t drop the ball. By concentrating on your own self-sufficiency, when the time comes you will be someone to whom your neighbors turn for help and advice: a de-facto community leader. Also consider getting involved in civic groups: a church, if you are so inclined, ethnic organizations, service clubs, and Little League, the PTA and Scouting, if you have children. Once people get to know you it’s less easy for them to dismiss your ideas wholesale. I doubt that many people listening to this podcast meet the following description, but there are a handful of European-American activists who think the first words out of their mouth in any conversation have to be about racial matters. Certainly, for certain sorts of activism and recruiting that may be appropriate. But when it comes to your neighbors, it’s best just to be a good neighbor and once your bona fides are long-established, if your neighbor just happens to see a copy of the EAU handbook on your kitchen table and asks a question, he’s already predisposed to trust your judgment when you answer because he has become accustomed to trusting your judgment. Answers can be fairly oblique, so leave it to your neighbor to express greater interest. While interacting with your immediate neighbors, it is important to interact first in areas where mutual interest and common ground can be found, and then allow the neighbors to explore other areas as they become ready. If you just happen to have five EAU members present at a cookout, and a racial matter comes up, you are far more likely to be seen as reasonable if five other people all around share your views. We covered this aspect of peer pressure in a previous podcast, but it is very real. If, on the other hand, you are the only guy out of twenty who even acknowledges the reality of race, you’ll be seen as a crackpot. So establish relationships first on common ground, invite folks over for cookouts and so forth; be seen as an authority figure in areas of self-sufficiency, and in situations where racial matters may be broached make sure you have some friends with similar views to yourself present. Also, develop yourself ideologically. EAU has made a conscious effort to adapt the lessons of successful European nationalists in developing our views to break out of the mould of “old school” American “racism,” which has often been presented repellently and with an emphasis on irrelevancies. EAU believes that our ideas are acceptable to ordinary white people if presented in a context and scope that is modern, positive and progressive. Our websites, podcasts and membership newsletters contain a wealth of information about these ideas, and we strongly encourage our members to take advantage of this material. As covered in the last two Western Voices programs, ethnic violence, particularly against our own people, already occurs at serious levels. And in the presence of resource scarcity, this violence will only escalate. At a time when a lot of your neighbors may not be paying the cable bill any more, and when ethnic violence against our Folk will have become sufficiently brazen as to be an undeniable fact of life, your neighbors will likely be quite receptive, especially to a life-affirming philosophy like ours. But don’t push it on them — rather, let them come to you. Speaking of ethnic violence, we’re going to have our work cut out for us. There are no doubt some people who look forward to such a prospect. If they do, it can only be because they are either insane or they overly romanticize something that is brutal beyond description. In plain English, ethnic violence means murdered children. Murdered children of any race are a tragedy beyond words. Higher levels of violence also mean a government whose march toward totalitarianism accelerates in the interests of safety. This is an outcome to be avoided if possible because once a government takes your freedom away, that freedom is never returned voluntarily. So it is in our best interests to keep the violence as controlled as possible. Moving to as nearly a homogeneously European-American neighborhood as possible will help reduce the incidence of ethnic violence and protect the innocent from harm. This is in everyone’s best interest. But even then, economic disruption, especially combined with current mindsets, is sure to increase crime in every community. As a result, especially if you have resources, you can expect home invasions to become more prevalent. These opportunistic invaders of any race could pose an immediate, credible, inescapable, life-threatening risk from which no retreat is possible. In such circumstances, you must stop the attack in order to protect innocent life. That’s all. Thus, you have a duty to protect yourself and your family. In practice, this usually means arming yourself and becoming trained in the proper use of firearms for self-defense. There are a number of training programs available, but what you should not assume is that the training required by various states in order to get a carry permit is even remotely sufficient. Stress situations precipitate adrenaline reactions that can make effective use of firearms difficult, so you should seek specific training or even self-training with a good manual. Also, don’t believe that reading a book on the topic will suffice. Actual physical training and practice with an element of stress is required to establish the muscle memory and reflexive reactions required to deal with life-threatening situations. Many of the leading presidential candidates favor more restrictive firearms laws, and especially laws that would adversely affect the types of arms most effective for self defense. That includes Giuliani, McCain, Clinton, Obama and others. So I would encourage you, if it is possible and you are not already properly equipped, to legally obtain a suitable firearm before the election. Please notice that I specify a firearm, NOT an arsenal. You aren’t preparing to fight World War III, but rather to defend your family from inescapable and immediate risks to life and limb. Fancy fantasy weapons are the mark of a fantasist with misplaced priorities. Not only are such weapons and their ammunition expensive, taking up resources better spent elsewhere, but they give a false sense of security and are often the cause of legal problems. Gun laws are so Byzantine and detailed that over emphasis on firearms has led to the downfall of many an activist at the hands of a government anxious to smear dissent as inherently violent. So use common sense when choosing implements for self-defense. In tandem with this, as crime rates rise, you should unite with your neighbors to form a Neighborhood Watch group that includes regular patrols that are conducted in compliance with local laws. This will help bring the community together and, again, put you in a position of trust with regard to your neighbors. Regular Neighborhood Watch meetings can be expanded to include family members so kids can get together and play and significant others can meet each other and discuss their common interests. An active neighborhood watch can dramatically improve the safety of your community. Likewise, when crimes do occur, your neighborhood watch group should seek justice by applying vigorous pressure whenever necessary to your local law enforcement agencies to move investigations and prosecutions forward. Swift justice serves as an active deterrent to further crime. Working through the system, and avoiding vigilante justice, will forge strong links with local law enforcement personnel and simultaneously remove justifications for totalitarian measures. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, most communities in the United States have organized volunteer first-responder networks under the auspices of FEMA that respond to natural and man-made emergencies. Anyone can join, and extensive training in first aid and even second-aid is provided at little or no cost to volunteers. Joining your local volunteer network will, just like joining or forming a neighborhood watch, increase your links across your community and put you into close contact with a large number of community-oriented, pro-active people. As a fringe benefit, the training you will receive in being a first responder will ultimately prove very valuable. Volunteer first-responder networks are called upon routinely to shore up roads during floods, direct traffic during community events, block off areas where firefighters are doing a controlled burn and so forth. These networks will also be among the first mobilized to take proactive measures to deter looting and other crime that could come in the wake of long-term power disruptions. Here is another place where you can build your community reputation and authority while simultaneously learning a great deal to help your family be self-sufficient and prepared. You will likewise be in a position to be much better informed than most about the risks and vulnerabilities faced by your community. I’ve covered a lot in today’s podcast, so I’d like to re-present the major points briefly. In addition to our normal activism at the political level, the upcoming economic disruption will require our members to become more self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency will work to the advantage of spreading our message at a time when our people will be most receptive to that message by combining our knowledge of economics, ethics and psychology. Some specific recommendations have been made regarding living arrangements, occupational excellence and starting home-based hobby businesses, as well as diminishing dependence on an unstable economy. Our members are encouraged to start on a path of self-sufficiency as an avenue to becoming credible community leaders and mentors in an upcoming time of resource scarcity. Our members are encouraged to increase their community involvement, both in direct interaction with neighbors and through neighborhood watch and volunteer responder programs. These will help make our communities safer, and establish the credibility and good will of our members in preparation for the leadership roles they will be assuming in their communities. A final note is in order. These preparations are individual preparations in large measure, and do not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent the sum total of the activism and plans of EAU as an organization. I am pleased to report that we have finally reached a sufficient critical mass of membership that we will be able to engage in effective political activism as well. To that end, over the next two months or so, every member of EAU will be hearing directly from either Frank Roman or myself. We will be speaking or corresponding with every member. Then we will get together and organize those members into effective groups based upon their interests and skills that will move our agenda forward at the political level. Our membership roster reads like a who’s-who of what every child dreams he or she will become when grown. Our membership consists of intelligent and thoughtful people, all of whom understand the risks faced by our people and the necessity for effective action. They are also deep thinkers who see beyond the desires of the moment into the long-range consequences of behavior. As a result, EAU has the potential to be the most politically effective organization of its type that has ever existed. It has been said that you should never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers. Well, we’re gearing up, and pretty soon our country will be seeing the power of intelligent, ethics-driven people in small numbers. They will not be disappointed. This has been John Young with European Americans United. Thank you for joining me again today. (1) http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/6/598 (2) Levine, Bruce (2007), Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, Chelsea Green Publishing (3) World Health Organization (2007), http://www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/definition/en/ (4) Murray, B. & Fortinberry, A. (2004), DEPRESSION: A Social Problem with a Relationship Solution, AHP Perspective, June/July 2004 (5) Levine, Bruce (2007), Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, Chelsea Green Publishing