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Dear fellow Freepers. We all must be prepared to survive and provide for our families for a minimum of one week without any kind of outside aid or assistance from anyone. For some of us this will be easy, for others it will require a deal of study and preparation. But do it now!

All Americans should make the same preparations but they won't. Freepers are more intelligent, informed and imaginative and therefore more willing to accept a word from the wise.

While out running some errands yesterday, I detected a general mood of unease among regular folk. Can't put my finger on it but I haven't felt it before and I don't think it's good. Gas prices and N.O. are probably the main cause. Anyway, I got lots of bullets and popcorn. I'm ready.

During the Y2K scare many of us learned that the first rule of personal survival, before buying the first supply, was to make sure you live in a low density area full of other self-reliant people.

Because if you are surrounded by stupid and short-sighted neighbors you will be in great danger no matter how well you prepare.

Anyone who lived in the New Orleans bowl violated this first requirement.

Years ago, IIRC, we were informed that in the event of a disaster (blizzard, flood, tornadoes), we should expect it to take up to 3 weeks for help to arrive. Things seems actually a bit faster these days. This advice came before they had prepositioned supply caches.

We keep a generator and the gas to run it, a case of drinking water, 6 weeks of food, a month of medications plus standard first aid, shortwave, batteries, tools and still, when we read about disasters, we always discover other things we should have stocked. We always have firewood left over after winter, camp stoves and the gas to run them, charcoal, etc. We have access to a river for water for flushing, but we would dig a latrine because our septic system requires electricity to pump into the drainage field and we would want to stretch the gas supply. Oh, and yes: we have guns and ammo, too.

So far, thank God, we have been without power and with impassable roads for no more than 4 days and that was in the summer after a huge storm. We and all our neighbors survived quite easily on our own.

There was an article from the Gulf Coast about food, cigarettes, beer and gas being barter items. One anecdote was about trading food for TV-watching.

I guess the worst case would be a nuclear attack, in which case, I would expect we would have to fend for ourselves for months or more.I would want to free up the Guard for more important duties.