And yes, I did just finish reading "One Second After"!
Thing is, when the SHTF, grasshoppers become swarming locust.
Trying to be ready for that, too...
“they’ll calmly inform us of their contingency plans: ‘Well, we’ll just come live with you if things get tough.’”
Tithing applies. Set aside 10% of food storage for charity. A big sack of rice goes a long way cheap for helping those who didn’t prepare.
Never heard of canning chicken breasts before. How do you do that?
The real solution is to attack the problem, not the result. Unemployment is high because of too many ill-conceived gov’t programs. Cut taxes (personal, corporate, and capital gains) and get out of the way. The gov’t has screwed things up and it's time for them to get the hell out of the market place and go back to the duties as stated in the Constitution. Canning a few pints of veggies is whistling in the graveyard...
Survival/Preparedness ping!
I admire the author’s prudent action to prepare a stock of food supply. ...... I hope she is just as prudent in preparing a way to defend it.
May I ask a question? Why on earth are you telling people what you are doing?
Sobering, wasn't it?
Interesting article; if my husband loses his job to this economy, I’m planning on packing up the contents of my ‘doom room’ and hightailing it up north to live with my family.
I don’t want to be sitting on a pile of food in the middle of a starving city.
To which the proper response is: "If you show up here empty handed I'll shoot you in the head."
I've used it. Believe me you find out real quick who your friends really are.
And then there are those of us who are literally in the sand, 7,000 miles from home, therefore finding it somewhat difficult to prepare for something we don't even really know is going to happen.
We're not all "Grasshoppers," you know.
My dad seems to equate prepping with hoarding disorder. Makes it very hard sometimes to protect things from his “cleaning”. But my land is safe (after one or two arguments and some rather territorial displays on my part), so I plant lots and lots of seeds.
I’m hoping to add a few outbuildings this year, the house will have to wait until I save enough for the permits. But, I know the town board is willing to make exceptions during difficult times, and they are all preppers themselves, so if things hit the fan I’m pretty sure the permits won’t be a problem. I’d just like to have something there before then.
I like this article, and I like her blog. Thanks for the ping!
What’s really disturbing is that there are people out there that area aware of the warning signs and what to do, but don’t want to take action.
Either they think that it’s just NOT going to happen OR they don’t want to think about it happening.
They don’t want to learn from history, but they have to realize that most assuredly there were people in the past in places like pre-WWII Germany who thought the very same way.
Psychologically speaking, it’s called “Normalcy Bias”.
My big question is: How do we overcome that Bias?
How do we convince people (in our own families in some cases) of the need to prepare?
The majority of these same clowns who aren’t prepared for a catastrophe are the same clowns that will spend thousands of dollars a year going to sporting events. They’re the same people who for the last 35 years know nothing of politics or what is going on around them, but can quote statistics all day from the NBA and the NFL.
CCC - Thanks for this post and for your blog.
Both of you (and all) - I have read “One Second After.” Very sobering book, as is “Lights Out” by Halffast (soon to come out as a book, about an EMP event as experienced in the South Texas area) and numerous other books and articles about the same. One that came out recently is here: http://www.survivalblog.com/2010/07/how_long_can_you_tread_water_b.html
I just saw “The Road” for the first time this weekend. As my wife said, it is a dark, DARK movie - and though the cause of the world being as it was in the movie isn’t entirely clear, my best guess is that it was an EMP strike (all the clocks stopped at 1:17 after a flash) followed by generalized nuke strikes. Very, very sobering.
For everyone out there - an EMP strike or a solar storm on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event would destroy modern civilization as we know it. We’d be instantly transported back to the pre-electric era (with very, very few exceptions), but without the knowledge or tools to survive. Further, back then (pre-1880 or so), the land simply could not support even close to the number of people we have now. There are not the stocks of food to help people last until the next harvest, nor the stocks of seed (non-genetically modified, so that the seeds of your new veggies will breed true the next planting) to even HAVE the next harvest. People who think that meat comes wrapped in cellophane at the grocery store will tend to have little stored away, and will panic almost instantly (because the water won’t run, nor will their stoves, microwaves or coffee-makers) - and in their panic they WILL turn to looting and cannibalism.
I hope and pray daily that we never witness such an event, but hope is not a plan. Bad things, VERY bad things, happen. You can’t stop them, but you can blunt their effects with a little foresight. I think that the most effective preparations that anyone can possibly make is to convince one or more others to become more self-reliant and to store some food and non-GMO seeds, among many other things. The more people that do this, the more time that the beast of starvation is held at bay, and with it the more time that some sort of semi-civilized and organized society can survive to deal with the crisis at hand.
In the meantime, I continue to learn, to buy more equipment and store more food, water, medical supplies, etc.
Make a list :
1. WATER,,,
2. Ammo,,,
3. Food,,,
4. Everything else,,,
The first 3 must be in that order,,,1,,,2,,,3,,,?,,,
Your life depends on this...