All I know is that while all of you are using rifles to defend cans of beans, I’ll be on a nice beach in a faraway country, watching this all go down on BBC news.
Think about WWII, or Ebola, or any revolution, or any actual real society-shaking event we have experienced.
The people who survive the best are the ones who can get out of the country easily and settle someplace else. The trick isn’t being prepped. It’s being able to recognize things are going downhill and get out before the the gates close.
A second citizenship to someplace geographically distant is better assurance of survival in any realistic scenario than any bunker or farm.
You’ll be there if they admit you which, depending on the situation, isn’t guaranteed. You’ll be on the beach if you have the assets stashed where you can access them to lead that lifestyle and aplace to live when you aren’t on that beach. You actually have any of this set up or is this just what you would do if you could be bothered to, you know, prepare for shit? My guess is you don’t because ISTM you were one of the ones in a recent similar thread who found it to be just too mucheven to have a bag packed with a change of clothes in it.
I can’t recall any situation in modern history where unaffected countries have turned away citizens or permanent residents. Have you? Friends and family abroad are a useful thing for someone hoping to survive a social upheaval to have, as is a broadly marketable skill (and being a native English speaker is one of the easiest things on the planet to market.) This actually is something I’ve thought through pretty well- I have a lot of friends who have moved abroad to weather the current economic crisis, and it’s worked out well for them.
Again, looking at actual things that have happened, that would be a pretty viable plan- much more viable than hunkering down in a bunker.
Ammo is for hunting, primarily; who knows when the ammo factory is going to be producing ammo again and when they will barter for their goods. Secondarily, ammo is for defending ones self against predators, be they four legged or two legged.
Lordy. I was ignorant of the term prepper until I clicked on this thread. Just another name for survivalist, which, I guess, is no longer PC but doesn’t invoke images of people who haven’t bathed and shaved for six months and are huddled in a collapsing hovel surrounded by cans of beans and guns pointing out the windows to kill the attacking hoards of starving.
What came to mind as I read it is a '50s Mad Magazine comic strip on a guy building a bomb shelter. IIRC, he placed the last brick and dropped dead of fright because of a camera flash.
It’s very like religion, complete with the selling of Judgment Day, the Old Testament being commie nukes, the New Testament being your own government or terrorists. Preppers might say they’re the same thing.
Buy them beans! Get an armoury! And a mule! Stock up on ammo no matter how high the gubmint hikes the price! It’s gonna happen!
Faith, baby. You gotta have faith. Or you’ll be sorry!
But my stashing hundreds of cans of beans and arming myself with a ton of guns wouldn’t and couldn’t have stopped it. No one even knew about it.
No one, even with an armoury in the basement, can stop an army, tanks, drones and planes, no matter where you are. Believing you can is magical thinking.
The folks who were prepared during Katrina were probably better off than those who didn’t.
The stores in LA that had people with rifles on the roof didn’t get burned down when the police decided it wasn’t worth protecting.
Apocalypse is probably not as likely as localized, temporary civil unrest. Natural disaster or other unpredictable major events can happen and do happen. Even being prepared for a 1-2 day power outage seems prudent.
Guns for self defense are prevalent all the time, why wouldn’t they be part of a standard preparation plan?
Sorry, but government exists to maintain the bureaucracy. The policy documents I deal with are on short on reality and long on “it won’t be that bad.” I think you will be sadly disappointed that if we have a national emergency on the scope of a New Madrid earthquake, a significant terrorist incident (bigger than 9/11), etc., government agencies will hunker down and do very little, internally and externally. However, expect the military to be the lead agency. Yes, martial law. Any communications systems you envision would be strictly for government use. Enjoy your cell phone and Internet access today. In a significant event, a windup AM/FM radio (no batteries) may turn out to be your major form of communications.
As for advanced preparations by the feds, zip. Nada. There is no money for it. When you look at ready.gov, it’s all about people (individuals, families) just hunkering down and existing. Expect no help from the government for a considerable period of time. FEMA is really saying for everyone to self-prepare and stock up now.
Today is the 315th anniversary of the Cascadia Earthquake. Current scientific opinion is a quake of that magnitude today means infrastructure (roads, railroads, water, gas, vehicle fuel, electricity, communications) to not be fully restored for months to years.
Wacky preppers are not so far off when you consider a significant regional/national event really does mean you will be on your own for a considerable period of time. What resources you can barter during the event will be crucial to your survival, as well as whatever preparations you have made and stored. And yes, whatever weapons you will have may be a deciding factor, especially if you are in an urban/suburban area.
If preppers are those people who are prepared for a blizzard and therefore don’t have to rush out and block the roads and buy the shelves empty, that’s great. But it seems to me that they are more prepared for The Attack Of The Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.
I think that people who diss the preppers are pretty much full of shit. Maybe not on everything, but, they shouldn’t be so free with condemnation.
The activities in the 90s, Liberia, Balkans (I say Balkans because I can’t keep track of those countries anymore, if I ever could), Cambodia…all of this happened in ‘civilized’ times, in highly civilized countries.
Sure, in America everything is nice and breezy now…but, what if something happens? Look at Detroit, and, that’s just one town. What if that happened to several other towns? Some supply lines/infrastructures get hit…on the same day, a terrorist attack happens in NYC? etc…
In our city, a few years ago, there was an ice storm, and it was at least a week before the power came on, and this wasn’t out in the sticks…this was a city.
The local PSA reports were saying “If you have aged or infirm, call the utilities and they will make a special effort…” When I called them, I got a big ‘fuck you’ from them. They had just restored power to the street 1 or 2 blocks over. I was directed to send my 70-plus year old mom, disabled by a stroke, to a communal shelter. A communal shelter for a woman over 70, disabled. Fucking marvelous. They didn’t want to hear my sad luck story.
There was, of course, no power for the alarm system at my house. The battery reserve died after 3 or 5 days, but, that didn’t matter, since the phone lines were still down, and the alarm company wouldn’t get the alarm. I was able to get to work. Leaving my mom home alone without phone service or an alarm which = vulnerable to any POS who would care to push in a door.
I bought a generator. I had to spend a LOT of money on power cords that could hold a minimum of the load. The gas for the generator sucked the life out of me. FEMA was no help. Oh, I’m sure that they let a few more contracts out to somebody that worked at the Capitol, but, I never heard any of it. They may have even created a new department.
Moral of the lesson: If the infrastructure breaks, you are hosed, and the ‘people are responding to those in need like champions!’ meme is a bunch of shit. You had better have at least a month’s supply of water or food. Minimum.
The collapse, not foreign takeover, of the infrastructure and police services is not that unrealistic.
None of your examples are examples where “prepped” stuff was actually valuable. A million cans of food wouldn’t help anyone in Kosovo or Cambodia- escape was the only thing that would assure safety.
The rest could be managed with a few days of food supply, which most families have. People in remote areas should probably plan for longer.
Your mother was offered a space to shelter, which is exactly how the system should work. She had a place to be safe. She also has family, which is a smart thing to have in a survival situation. She didn’t “have” to sit alone in the dark with no phone and thugs beating down the door, unless her kids didn’t mind that situation.
Obviously it’s not that comfortable, and there is a lot you can do to increase your comfort in an emergency. But that’s a different thing than increasing survival.
Always rely on the kindness of strangers. To use a more venerable analogy, there are always people who are grasshoppers, and there are always people who are ants.
Ironically enough, the most enthusiastic Y2K catastrophist I knew was the most egregious “grasshopper” in my social circle. She never had any savings, had burned her credit so hard that she couldn’t qualify for a checking account, would walk out of any job where she felt she was being treated unfairly (which was roughly all of them), and still relied on her parents for her house payment (she was in her mid-40s at the time). But DAMNED if she wasn’t going to stock up on C-rations, bottled water, and ammunition for the inevitable collapse of the world.
So, no…you haven’t really done anything except think about how nice it is to have friends in another country. I didn’t see anything in there at all about assets. Could you afford a ticket on the first available plane right now when there isn’t a crisis? Airlines over book in normal times…I wonder what kind of frightful fucking mess they’ll make when there is enough of a crisis that people start fleeing the country. Once you are there, assuming you manage to make it there, did you have any plans other than being a financial burden on these people you are counting on to take you in? Any situation fucked enough to cause people to flee the US is just about bound to crash the economy world wide. What are you bringing to their table other than another mouth to feed?
But hey, you’re you. Etc.