Posted on 03/15/2024 6:46:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Nearly 15 million Americans had 31 days or more of at-home preparedness in 2020.
In these unsettled times, after the pandemic and related disorder, if you're wearily preparing for election year chaos, you're not alone. The Department of Homeland Security says "the 2024 election cycle will be a key event for possible violence" which half of Americans expect to be a feature of future political contests, no matter who wins. As divided as the country is, such fears unite us in preparing for hard times, whether they result from political turmoil or the natural unpredictability of the world.
Growing Ranks of the Prepared
"Researchers say the number of preppers has doubled in size to about 20 million since 2017," Reuters reports. "Much of that growth is from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump's 2016 election, the pandemic, more frequent extreme weather and the 2020 racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd."
Reuters based the story on attendees at a recent "Survival & Prepper Show" in Longmont, Colorado, where a "30-year-old lesbian" mingled with "bearded white men with closely cropped hair," "hippy moms," and "Latino families." Attendees cited COVID-19, supply-chain interruptions, power outages, and other disruptions that eroded faith in authorities and pushed them to prepare for emergencies.
It's unfortunate when anybody suffers through reminders that social order can be fragile. But it's wise for people to take responsibility for their well-being. In fact, the attendees at that show are representative of a significant segment of Americans.
"In 2022, 55 percent of adults surveyed stated they had pursued three or more of the twelve preparedness actions," the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reports of survey results in its 2023 National Preparedness Report. "Although a variety of factors may be contributing to the changes in preparedness that FEMA has recorded over time, one of the most significant factors was the COVID-19 pandemic." (The 12 actions include assembling and updating supplies, making your home safer, and planning with neighbors; see a full list here.)
Among the more serious and sympathetic researchers on preparedness is U.S. Army Col. Chris Ellis, who has worked with FEMA to analyze the state of preparedness among Americans. In his 2021 paper, The Noah Virus: Who Is Infected With High Resiliency for Disaster?, he defines prepping as "the act of readying one's self or one's family, via means of supplies, tools, and skills, for a potential (often severe) future hazard, either natural or manmade."
"The 20 million US preppers mark has solidly been crossed," Ellis wrote for The Prepared in 2022. "If you use the broader definition of a prepper as someone who can handle at least two weeks of disruption, the number gets even higher."
Millions of Resilient Citizens
What's impressive is how many people don't stop there. Ellis uses the term "resilient citizens" to describe those "who can survive for 31 or more days at home without power, water, or transportation." He estimated that "14.9 million Americans had 31 days or more of at-home preparedness in 2020. Ultra-Highly Resilient Citizens (97 days or more of preparedness) jumped from four million people in 2017 to 6.7 million in 2020."
That's a lot of people who have put away canned goods, purchased generators, and made plans for storms and power outages with the neighbors. And yes, as per Reuters, the ranks of regular preppers and resilient citizens extend far beyond the bunker-dwellers we see on bad TV shows.
A Wide Variety of Prepared Americans
In his 2021 paper, using data from 2018, Ellis found that resilient citizens were 75.1 percent white, 6.5 percent black, 1.4 percent Asian, 1.9 percent American Indian or Alaska Native, 1.9 percent Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 5.6 percent Hispanic. Urban dwellers made up 62.8 percent of resilient citizens, with 12 percent being small town/rural in the surveyed group. "Income, education, geographical residence, and political party either were statistically insignificant or not substantive," he added.
Of course, that was before the chaos of 2020, which spurred a sense of urgency among many.
"Asians disproportionately embraced prepping in '20, which perhaps makes sense given what they may have been hearing from friends and family back in Asia during early Covid combined with some of the anti-Asian racism that grew in the US in '20," Ellis wrote in 2022 using updated data.
The mainstreaming of preparedness overall should be no surprise given that Americans embracing one area of prepping—the ability to defend yourself and your family—have come to look much like the wider population in recent years.
"An estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became new gun owners from 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021. Most (5.4 million) had lived in homes without guns," according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "Approximately half of all new gun owners were female (50% in 2019 and 47% in 2020 to 2021), 20% were Black (21% in 2019 and in 2020–2021), and 20% were Hispanic (20% in 2019 and 19% in 2020–2021)."
People willing to breach the strong cultural and legal barriers to firearms ownership should find it relatively easy to stock the pantry and put away some candles. In uncertain times, taking on such personal responsibility becomes not just attractive but necessary.
"People are realizing that it's important to be able to depend on what you can do for yourself," Jennifer Council, a self-described black urban farmer, told Reuters.
Complacency Kills
The greatest barrier to resilience may be complacency, as recent disruptions fade into memory.
"From 2017 to 2019, FEMA observed a steep increase in the percentage of respondents who indicated (self-assessed) that they were prepared for a disaster," notes the 2023 National Preparedness Report. "However, by 2022, this percentage had dropped back to the level it was in 2017."
That's unfortunate, because the easing of public health fears (and damaging policy overreactions) and the return of relative order to the streets are a sign that crises are survivable, not an indicator that they're gone forever. Hopefully, 2024 won't deliver yet another unpleasant wake-up call.
I agree completely; it will get ugly in blue parts of America.
Beau and I were just discussing have a talk with our neighbors about the kind of community we could easily build here if we needed to. As a group, we have an amazing array of talents and resources available to us.
And, we’re all well-armed. ;)
Sounds like an ideal situation and a good idea.
Bkmk
It'd be cost prohibitive to be 100% grid free (particularly in the winter). Basically I don't want to fight the law of diminishing returns. But I've run over the stats from my solar inverters to see what would have to be done to get there in case the Dims go full mark-of-the-beast style control over energy. It'd be about as much on improving the home's energy efficiency (i.e. take down sheetrock to put in more insulation) as it would be on adding to the solar system.
IMHO, if you're interested in solar, the first step is to do common sense things to make your home not need as much power anyway (i.e. caulk seal cracks, add insulation, if you live in the south replace your A/C with a variable speed heat pump, replace your water heater with a hybrid water heater and duct the air intake of the water heater to pull warm air from the attic and duct the air output from the water heater into the intake of your HVAC -- but be able to redirect it during winter months). I'm embarrassed that I waited until I was looking into solar before I realized that half the battle is making the home operate more efficiently. I should have done that part many years ago without thinking about solar.
Yes, that calls for aggressive pest control.
“It’s not that hard to have guns legally in most places, we did even in California.”
Democrats endlessly trying to stop that.
There are some decent deals on M855 now.
BKMRK.
“...half the battle is making the home operate more efficiently.”
Excellent advice. We live in a farmhouse from 1900. While Beau has re-modeled it all from scratch, that was 30+ years ago, so we are continuing to make improvements.
One super simple thing I suggested (and he did) was to insulate the inside of the north-facing cabinet under the corner kitchen sink. The kitchen was added to the 4-square house at some point in it’s history. It sits over a crawl space. Beau cut pieces of rigid foam insulation board to fit. It’s nice and warm under there now and no more frozen kitchen sink pipes in sub-zero weather!
Such a simple thing! We also replaced all the weather seal strips around the kitchen door. Granted, the door is hard to close now, but that baby is air tight! :)
New windows are needed, but they are many, so that’s going to be a ‘few a year’ thing...until we die, LOL!
This thread is about prepping. I'm not into doomsday prepping. I'm into slow boil prepping -- I call it that because I see the left slow boiling the water to kill us instead of it being an abrupt cut off of basic needs. And for whatever reason, the Dims have chosen energy to be their main weapon to tighten the screws on us a little more, and a little more.
That's what solar is for me -- a financial defense against the Dims' warmageddon cult energy policies. For you it might not work as well in Wisconsin. But here in Alabama where we spend more energy in the year fighting the heat than we do the cold, solar is great as long as it's decentralized and as long as you do lots of homework on making sure it's feasible for your situation and, bonus points, learn how to tweak it to optimize it for your situation.
As the world crumbles, preppers can crank up the generator to broil steaks, bake potatoes and prepare apple pie.
And the starving neighbors will walk by, mumbling how lucky that guy is to be eating steak tonight.
Ensure that the unit/panels can assist you in getting water. If a well, get an inverter that can drive your well pump, or a manual pump to bring up the water. No water, no life.
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