Let me put it this way - It’s so rare, they felt it worthwhile to make a TV show about it. It’s as rare as extreme couponing, hoarding, auction picking, and storage bidding.
In my house, we like to play a little game when we watch the show. We try to be the first to correctly guess the trauma in the prepper’s life that led to their psychotic break. If you pay attention, it’s always there. Sometimes the person lost all their money in the stock market or bad business bet, and sometimes the person had an abusive parent or one that isolated them from others. Others had close family members die suddenly.
Next time you watch the show, be on the lookout for it. It’s always something that makes the person afraid of others, afraid of death, or afraid of not having/losing resources.
I have some non-perishable food that gets rotated. Stuff like canned tuna and chicken, rice, various pastas, jarred pasta sauce for the pasta or rice (my husband is perfectly content to eat plain jarred sauce for a while, but he prefers my sauce), some canned vegetables (we vastly prefer frozen), and other shelf stable items. We’ve got candles, lamps, charcoal and lighter fluid, a grill, logs, a fireplace, and a lighter. We have several flashlights scattered around the house and I check them four times a year (soltices and equinoxes). Mostly, this is all stuff that is actually usable whether or not we have a problem. We can easily cope with a power outage of several days, if it’s not too hot.
However, longer than that, or if a BIG disaster hit, we wouldn’t be able to survive. I figure if The Big One hit, I’m dead anyway, because I need insulin. So either I OD on my hydrocodone, or I eat a bullet, and Bill heads out to his farm/hunting range, taking all the guns and ammo with him. But I don’t really think that he’d survive, either, unless he manages to get someone who knows a lot more about this sort of thing than he does. I happen to be know more about camping, because I loved it when I was younger. I also know about primitive skills. Once the gas tank’s empty and he’s used all his bullets, though, Bill is in trouble.
Yeah, I grew up in California, and my elementary school pretended to require that we have an emergency kit, but nobody really cared and I don’t think the kit ever had anything any it other than a shiny blanket and granola bar. If civilization collapsed tomorrow, I’d be dead in 30 minutes. I don’t even have a working flashlight. I did, but I think the battery died about a year ago. Plus I lost it.
Around here, the power goes off a few times a year. I bought some cheap flashlights from a big box store, and stashed them around the house, so I don’t trip over something (probably a cat) when the lights go out. We also have a few GOOD flashlights, for Bill’s hunting expeditions. The cheap flashlights are good enough to enable us to find the candles and matches and lamps.
You also have to establish just what you mean by “prepared”. There are a lot of people, for instance, (a small proportion of the total population, but still too many) who think that “preparedness” consists of “stockpile a sufficient amount of guns and ammo”, and that there is no problem that cannot be solved by sufficient firearms. Canned food? Generator? Who needs those when you have guns?
On the other hand, you have folks like my mom. She probably does have a year’s supply of nonperishable food in her house, but it’s not because she thinks there’s going to be some year-long disaster that she might need to weather-- It’s because it lets her buy all of those things when they’re on sale, and some of it is things she’s canned herself and can only do in season to last the whole year. If disaster did strike, though, she’d have that available.
I keep a spare handicap-parking placard, just in case I forget or lose my original. Can’t be too cautious!! I couldn’t imagine having to resort to double-parking. I mean, the lawlessness! :eek:
The fundamental problem with that theory is that the shooter with the longest range wins. So, the guy with the .30-30 Winchester can take out the putz with a .40 S&W pistol, but he is at the mercy of the shooter with a .308 Win. Both are fair game to the elk hunter who has a 7mm Remington Magnum with Leupold optics. And the former Recon sniper who snuck home a Barrett M82 and a few hundred rounds of M1022 ammo is going to clean house and walk away with all the sundries he can carry. If you are going to live by the sword, you’d better have the biggest sword in the kingdom.
What is really going to help you in a survival situation is all of the supplies you can pack inside your skull. Having a few basic tools such as a field knife, saw, matches, flashlight, and med kit plus the skills to use these to forage, trap, fish, and make shelter will get you through most any natural disaster that cuts you off from civilization. Relying on having access to a big bag of shit means that you have to carry a big bag of shit around with you, which slows you down when you probably want to be as mobile as possible. Having a large storehouse of food, weapons, and tools upon which you are reliant for survival means you are stuck in your location. Now, if you know you are travelling in inclement weather, it is certainly smart to pack some bivvy sacks, sleeping bags, food and water, but when push comes to shove you shouldn’t have to rely on any of this gear to survive.
Long term “survival” after the collapse of civilization is another bag, but the same principles still apply; stockpiling a bunch of ‘stuff’ (be it food, guns, tools, et cetera) is ultimately less useful than the basic and largely forgotten skills of how to make tools and shelter starting from only primitive elements. All the guns in the world aren’t going to help you when you are freezing to death because you don’t know how to make a stormproof shelter or prepare tinder for a fire.
Well, we are prepared mainly in self defense - the jackasses who run the electric company here in Connecticut mismanage badly enough that we tend to have at least 1 full week a year of power outage and some years we have had more. We had a year with almost 2 weeks in the summer and just over a week in the winter, and several shorter 6 hour to 24 hour outages [those due to some idiot hitting a pole and knocking a transformer out] We have 2 generators - 1 220 to deal with our deep well pump and a 110 for the refrigerator, and a power strip that handles the cable, modem, laptop, a lamp and recharging the phones. I have been considering a smaller solar setup for the non-refrigeration stuff the 110 generator is doing - basically running the bedroom/home office on solar.
Foodwise, put it down to 2 midwestern farm mothers - mrAru’s is from Missouri, mine from Iowa. We just feel happier with a bunch of dried and canned goods stockpiled. Never know when one is going to get stuck in a blizzard - I can remember some wicked east coast blizzards while growing up. Especially one in 1978 that had us snowbound with 5 or 6 people that worked with my father that didn’t make it out of town by the time it was getting really bad. Wood stoves come in very handy!:pI love mine - it has 2 internal compartments, one firebox and one oven, and the top is geared for 2 burners worth of pots. I regularly heat the house with it in the winter and cook with it. I think it gives a much evener heat than the idiotic hot water baseboard radiator the house has.
Yeah, anyone subject to the horrendously poorly maintained power companies in New England* is going to be a bit better “prepared” during an emergency than places that never experience a lack of power for several days at a time. Not everyone has a generator, but at least 75% of people I know who live in houses rather than apartments have a fireplace or wood stove. During the winter, especially, non-perisable food is stocked up on, not in case of nuclear war, but in case you get 3’ of snow and need 2-3 days to dig out.
*so badly that our state formed a bi-partisan committee to investigate why the power goes out so often - conclusions? power companies didn’t trim trees near power lines as often as required by law for several years
Yeah, there are different types of survivalists and preppers. There’s the conspiracy-minded ones, the “it makes me feel awesome to be able to deal with any disaster” ones, etc.
I consider myself a mild to moderate prepper, on the “the Midwest has disasters too and we do live a block from a major train line” end of things. After seeing Katrina, I worried about what a disaster would mean for my area, and Sandy really drove that home. A couple summers ago, we had about a half-dozen major power outages with ruined food, to the point where a decent generator was looking like a smart investment. (Since then, not really.) I have a couple “bug-out bags” and bins of the “GTFO, flood’s incoming!” sort, nothing for zombies or nuclear war or anything. This includes a packet with copies of useful documents like ID, health/car/etc insurance, etc. Our two pet rabbits have their own travel bag of stuff that doubles as their bug-out bag too.
(Until this past week, when I finally had to use it, I had a special “get out fast for my sister-in-law’s passing” ‘go bag’ in case I was an hour away at work when my husband got the news that the end was near for her; he could just grab my pre-packed bag with funeral-appropriate clothes and another set, plus toiletries, shoes, etc., and come get me then head out.)
We have a store of a small but decent number of gallons of water in the basement in case of boil orders, water main break, etc., plus a couple ways to purify water. We have some easy-to-prepare food of various kinds stored in case of various Sandy-level disaster, much of which gets rotated through our regular food stores. I do home canning (hello, Midwesterner and granddaughter of two farming families), as well. We have a weather radio, a tiny solar panel set that can be used to charge cell phones while camping, tons of spare batteries, that kind of thing.
I don’t know any people like that, but then again, I live in NJ, where rural areas where survivalist types tend to congregate are few and far between.
I do know some Mormons who live in NYC that keep the years’ supply of food. I can’t see how that’s a bad idea. Interesting to hear how they manage the storage space in an apartment. Wall of boxes covering the back wall of a closet? Check!
Hopefully people in this area are taking more care with disaster preparedness in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I wish I could say that I was doing better with this myself. Now that I say that, I realize that it is hurricane season, so I think I’ll lay in some extra water and food and get that pack of AA batteries that I’ve been meaning to buy.
I do expect the government to provide emergency services in case of disasters. It’s part of what I pay for with my taxes. I also recognize that the government can only do as much as it can do, and that may not be as much as I need. After Sandy, there was only so much they could do. (Fortunately, I was very lucky and didn’t suffer much comparatively.)
IOW, states that barely have a “civilization” to prepare for the collapse for.
There’s a difference between being prepared for a legitimate disaster and being prepared for a zombie apocalypse. Having a weeks worth of nonperishable food, drinkable water, flashlights and whatnot, maybe even a backup generator is just good sense. Having a plan to grab your AR15 and a go-bag full of MREs so you can fight your way to a secret underground bunker in the hills is a bit over the top.
This includes a packet with copies of useful documents like ID, health/car/etc insurance, etc. Our two pet rabbits have their own travel bag of stuff that doubles as their bug-out bag too.