Terry, I don't know if you see the things the author of the collapse / prepare article is describing but there are parts and pieces of what she describes here in Calif. Bars on windows and doors, lots of trash dumped along roads outside town, roadside ornamental plantings gone to weeds and dead trees for lack of water ,lots of people pushing
grocery carts with everything they own in them, very few police, and junked cars in people's yards. You also start to feel the hair on your back starting to rise because you can tell people are watching you.
Sometimes they ask for change and you can tell they live outside because their clothes aren't clean and showers are far between. If you are brave and start looking and walking along the railroad tracks , in riverbeds, or in the brush along the freeways you see blankets ,garbage and encampments. I am talking about hundreds and hundreds of people in some cities already living on nothing. Places where it gets over 100 degrees during the day and there just isn't a safety net for these people.
If you ask the locals what has happened and you hear rationalizations like drugs but I wonder if it's just how people still making it try to block out the bad things. Ya some of the homeless are on drugs but there are also old people and various ethnic groups over represented and I don't think they look like
drugs got them.
So you kick down some pocket change ,offer some food and try to be kind. I ask them maybe to tell me about why they are on the road. I used to pick up hitchhikers cause I used to hitch hike but it just got kinda scary and I don't pick people up very often anymore. I was starting to realize I needed to figure out how to defend myself if I had to. Anyway some of these people are pretty close to zero carbon or about as close as people get in our society. I think if you could organize them and really learn their individual stories there might be a way to provide them a little comfort and someplace to work their way back up. But there isn't much of a safety net for them and sadly I think more people are going to learn what it's like when society casts you out. And the people still with jobs and some money will have their rationalizations for it all until it's them on the street.