I would be kind of shocked if my family didn’t take me in. I kind of suspect they will be glad I escaped the zombie apocalypse and happy to help us get on our feet. I would be be legal to work and have marketable skills in that country. And savings should cover plane tickets, even inflated ones. Life would probably be hard for a while, but it’d be hard anywhere in the situation we are discussing.
Moving to a new country when the get bad isn’t some absurd thing that nobody does. It’s basically why most Americans are in the US. And most of them did it with no support system in place.
Again, maybe not an ideal situation. But we are comparing this to hunkering down with a bunch of guns and MREs while armed bandits and FEMA thugs maraud around the country. I’d rather be living the immigrant experience, hard as it is, than the Mad Max one.
So will you be taking your plane/boat/helicopter/transporter to this new location? The whole idea that you can or would simply flee to another country during a time of sudden, temporary, and violent civil unrest is unrealistic.
You keep making sneering references to MRE’s, guns, and zombies…none of which I have mentioned. I understand why you keep doing it. A ridiculous position is easy for you to mock and dismiss. Too bad it isn’t the position I hold.
Your position seems to be that even absolutely minimal preparation, i.e. having a bag with clothes and a few necessary items in it, isn’t worth doing because nothing bad is ever going to happen to you and, if anything bad does happen, you will just board that big silver bird to where other people will take care oif you. Who knows? Maybe for a special snowflake like you that is a viable strategy. other people, who aren’t as special as you, don’t have those options. Your plan, such as it is, isn’t really a plan because you didn’t think it through and arrange it. It is shit-ass good luck of birth.
Wait, if it’s temporary, then I can just stay home. I’ve got a couple weeks of food in the cabinets and my building is sturdy. No need for six months worth of water and a pile of guns.
If it’s more enduring, then escaping via plane is consistently realistic with every similar situation we’ve ever encountered.
The appeal of being a prepper is that someone who’s unsatisfyingly mundane in their normal life can instantly feel superior to 99.99% of the population simply by going out to tacticalbadass.com and spending a few hundred dollars on survival equipment. Sure, Johnson might have gotten that big promotion because he actually has marketable skills in this world, but you’ll show him when the S hits the F and you’ve got a some beef jerky and paracord.
So yes, preppers deserve to be scoffed at because they’re all scoffing at us.
Must “preppers” be antisocial loners as y’all imagine? What about people who agree with you about the importance of community and cooperation, and also believe that modern fossil-fueled industrial society maybe isn’t sustainable?
For the position they wish to further, preppers must be like that. People who have a plan, some supplies, and some friends are too sensible and mainstream to be dealt with by simple hooting and jeering.
Unfortunately, those in positions of power and privilege who wanted to tear apart Yugoslavia were highly adept at keeping track of “those countries.” Maybe if more people gave a damn about what their governments were doing in their name around the world, such things (and the collapses we’re talking about here, more generally) would not have happened! That goes for Cambodia as well. There was nothing the least bit civilized aboutNixon and Kissinger (“Yes Mr. President, anything that flies on everything that moves.”)ordering the aerial destruction of Cambodia, with an enormous death toll, paving the way for the Khmer Rouge to take over.
That happens pretty frequently, though usually involving ground-based methods of transportation. It’s quite realistic.
I’m not sure how to put this, but if preppers were concerned about the collapse of industry, they could prepare just as well be hoarding, say, hand drills and drill bits. People gotta drill things, and without electricity who are they gonna come to? That’s right, the guy who prepared. They’d be able to trade their drills for food and clothing.
But that’s predicated on the assumption that there’d still be a society to trade with. That people would still need to make holes in things with drills. Preppers don’t seem to be preparing for that sort of future. Instead, they prepare for a collapse of trade, or a collapse of cooperation. Things that have been fundamental to the survival of humans for the last, say 10,000 years. They might not be loners now, but they certainly anticipate a future in which they’d have to survive without cooperation.
eta: Of course, collecting hand drills isn’t fun, and comes with no feeling of superiority.
Naturally. If you’re satisfied with your real life, there’s no need to buy hand drills OR jerky. You can spend that money instead on delicious craft beer.
Certainly many people would like to be able to survive on their own, or at least would like to think they could if it came to it. But everyone I have read or talked to, that I see as serious, expects trade and cooperation to continue, indeed to become more personal and central than ever.
^ After all, apart from guns and nonperishable food stores, what is the most stereotypical thing to stockpile? Gold and silver, right? The value of this utterly depends on there being commerce.
Nobody can stockpile every possible need. What you do stockpile is often likened to an investment portfolio. A diversified portfolio allows both utility from the stockpiled item and trade with others.
Fair enough. Of the preppers I know, only one has any gold, but that’s definitely a stereotypical thing. He seems to be more concerned with a collapse of the stock market (and ultimately the US dollar as a result), but he also has a bunch of AR-15s, presumably to protect the gold. But since hoarding gold is a thing, I concede the point.