Lessons of survival from "The Road"
 

I certainly don't think "The Road" is any kind of "survival manual", but if one were to try and make some conclusions from McCarthy's imagining of a bleak post-apocalyptic future, in terms of the survival implications:

1. There is only so much preparation you can make for an end-of-the-world event that lasts years or decades. You can prepare for the short-term, but beyond that it will be luck and pluck. Most survival events, in probabilistic terms, would not be as terrible. Therefore preparations *do* matter.

2. The difficult choices that must be made. Help others or not? Kill others or not?

3. Strength in numbers. As long as the numbers have the resources to live.

4. Inventiveness, careful observation, caution (but not too much) are rewarded.

5. Some kinds of survival are not, morally speaking, worth living.

6. The importance of hope and a good attitude.

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We live in a world, in a country, where almost no one has any preparation of any sort. If the bonds that hold us together began to tear, who do you have to rely on? Are you and yours going to be the weak links? Even after you have been warned by friends, family, and your church?

“The revelation to store food may be as essential to our temporal salvation today as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah”
--Ezra Taft Benson, October 1973 (I assume this is a true and accurate quote)