These Suburban Preppers Are Ready for Anything
chicagomag.com
chicagomag.com
I'm not a prepper; I am a hobby gardener, though; I'm a hiking, backpacking, camping enthusiast; I'm a practical homeowner who comes from a blue collar background and owns a decent collection of tools which I use regularly. I live in a hurricane zone, so I keep lamps and extra food on hand. So what does a prepper do different? Every one I've met doesn't use their stuff.
It's the same with the 'survival' crowd. They don't go camping, they "practice".
Makes me wonder if it's just an excuse to consume.
Never underestimate an American's belief that any problem can be solved by shopping.
The firearms discussion in this article was even funnier. All of these guys own AR-15 variants. Not a bad weapon to have in a civil strife situation but mostly worthless in the typical configuration for game hunting. These fools will happily plunk down thousands of dollars for reflex sights, forend grips, and single-point slings but few of them own a decent hunting rifle with a scope. Previous election year ammunition hoarding has shown that .223/5.56 and .308/7.62 get scarce quickly but popular hunting rounds like 30.06 are generally easy to find.
The narcissism in this article is strong. I get the feeling that these guys might even pray for civil society to collapse just so they can get a shot at being someone important.
Then, in the fall, he'll have more potatoes than he knows what to do with.
There seem to be plenty of preppers who actively garden, probably more than you do and I bet you would enjoy learning something from them. Of course if you've made up your mind about all of them based on "every one [that you've] met", I guess it's time to just ignore the subject, since you're done learning about it?
It is a very good idea to keep a few days' worth of non-perishable food and water on hand, even in the absence of an apocalyptic "SHTF" scenario. Things happen. A few years back my town was hit by a hurricane, and our water was out for three days after an electrical failure fouled the municipal purification systems. I had enough bottled water on hand to ride that out comfortably, which was nice.
But that's not "prepping" so much as just common sense. Building a fortified cabin in the woods and stocking it with AR-15s is something else entirely. It's getting ready for a scenario that I'm not sure it's entirely possible to ever be "ready" for.
That is the problem I see with this kind of "prepping": its isolationism. The focus in such a situation should not be an every-man-or-family-for-itself attitude. The focus should be on getting all the people who aren't "zombies" together to begin rebuilding long-term living solutions.
Besides, turning away starving people and keeping everything for yourself is just plain wrong.
All that is not to say that there wouldn't be "bandits", and that it wouldn't be necessary to defend the "good guys." But the fundamental attitude seems wrong to me.
Fun story: I got onto I-440 around Raleigh after Floyd came through, and there was this long line of cars driving really slowly. Really bizarre, since most of the time the road is a racetrack. I get to the head of it, and they're all following an ice truck to it's next stop so they can top-up their coolers.
The thing people lose sight of when they hear "those guys are storing years worth of food in their basement" is that those people aren't necessarily storing it for themselves. In a real disaster, those people are in a better position than most to help their neighbors out.
It's a pretty big contrast between that mindset and the common prepper/survivalist mindset.
That's an excellent point. The "prepper" mindset seems to be about isolationist survival, Castaway style. That's not a good long-term mindset. If a real Bad Thing happened, after the immediate aftermath, people would need to start coming together to rebuild societies and communities and infrastructures, not disappearing into the wilderness.
"[Hurricane Katrina's] aftermath was a wake-up call for thousands
of Americans. “It taught people you could go hungry, thirsty, and
even die in the U.S. before the government could save you.”
"I’m a bit of a prepper. I probably have some materials and views
that could get me seriously put on a watch list."
I ask Campbell if he fears the kind of lawlessness seen in post-
Katrina New Orleans or the riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
Preppers emphasize certain threats and ignore others to “craft
a scenario where their preparations can be seen as both necessary
and sufficient.”
Anyway, you could say that these people aren't doing any harm to anyone or anything besides their own bank accounts, but I disagree with that. Between fostering a greater sense of paranoia and distrust between them and their neighbors, helping them double down on a "I've got mine, so fuck you" attitude, and inspiring them to vote for fringe candidates who not only agree with them, but actively want to see the apocalypse happen[3], I'd say these people are doing real harm to the fabric of society.
[1] http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/katrina/Lan...
[2] http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/03/brown.fema.emails/
[3] http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Michele-Bachmann-Barack-Oba...
(Americans have apparently already forgotten, or maybe never even realised, what an enormous international embarrassment that was.)
The French (European) heatwave had a lot of long held social and family structures that contributed to it, from a tendency of the elderly to live by themselves, often disconnected to one degree or another from family, most of the country was in 'holiday' mode in August, and other things.
The embarrassing thing about Katrina wasn't that it happened (though the flooding was preventable), or the deaths.
It was that -the agency specifically designed to deal with the AFTERMATH, and given billions of dollars to do so- was so spectacularly incompetent, from the top down (Michael "Heck of a Job" Brown, a lawyer friend of Bush's put in charge of FEMA who by the time of Katrina had no more emergency management experience than the NIMS course you and I can take online for free), that they actively made things worse in many cases, not better.
The further up the ladder of technological development you try to reproduce with prepping, and the longer the timescales of self-sufficiency you work towards, the more you are essentially engaging in an exercise to find out how to reboot civilization to a selected technology level, from another selected technology level. You also find out post-haste that this effort goes rapidly non-linear as you extend those two axes. There are related discussions floating around the Net about what it would take to establish a completely independent space habitat (or extrasolar planetary colony).
Due to this dynamic, realistic rebuild-from-apocalypse prepping to current technological levels (or even 1940's levels) takes government-scale resources, and a very aggressive low-pass filter on the finances of prepping ensures the population of those preppers who alarm you will only ever be an extremely small and ineffectual group. There are way more imminent threats than this group. As groups go, politicians who vote for the Patriot Act and the increasing militarization of police represent a far more legitimate and immediate threat to you and society than these preppers ever will; anti-vaxxers against, say, polio vaccinations are also far more dangerous.
But there are lessons to draw from everywhere and all experiences in life. From the preppers, learning about a measure of self-sufficiency doesn't hurt; for many working poor and middle class in the world, greater autonomy from rentier processes in our current incarnation of civilization definitely wouldn't hurt. From the politicians, learning the price of centralizing responses to risks instead of delegating responsibility to citizens can be instructive to future generations. Even from the anti-vaxxers, we can learn the value of understanding how to critically assess scientific research on our own.
I read the article you referred to. That's a gross misrepresentation of her comments and views. You're implying that Bachmann would do things to try to bring about economic and societal collapse, but that's completely false. Rather, the truth is that she interprets current events as being indicative of the inevitable coming of her interpretation of biblical prophecy about end times.
If you don't understand the difference, then it suggests to me an anti-Christian bias on your part.
Now, what is actually written in the Bible? "But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Mk 13:32)
If Jesus didn't know, then I don't think Michele Bachmann or anyone else knows, whether or not they are or claim to be a Christian.
And you know what else is doing real harm to the fabric of our society? Painting all Christians as "fringe" and "fundamentalists" who are "doing real harm to the fabric of society."
Think about who the real enemy is. If you offend one group's sensibilities by ridiculing their prophet, they riot and murder people. If you offend another group the same way, they...what? Hold prayer vigils?
Oh, those evil Christians! America will surely be a better place when they're all gone!
Just remember that when you sweep them out, something else will take their place. And that something else has already stated its intention to subjugate all peoples under its laws, or else kill them.
Be careful what you wish for.
When I was about 14-15, I loved Stephen King's "The Stand" and some of my friends liked it too. The youth fetish culture didn't really exist in that time and place, but the book and its post apocalypse world fascinated us. We talked out what we'd do and how. Find an island. Rescue damsels. Train dogs.
It's a persistent sort of a fascination. Interestingly so. It would be fun to find out more about the art history of zombie apocalypses.
Under this, in some way, is the fact that major catastrophes and cultural "rebooting" plays a pretty substantial role in human history. I find the idea that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones. There are some pretty interesting suggestions that the early fertile crescent civilizations' (eg Egypt) sudden rise are actually rebuilding events following the catastrophic demise of earlier (EG Gobleki Tepeh in Turkey) civilizations. There's also a lot of genetic evidence of major population collapses at several points.
There's also post war baby booms and some other bits and pieces suggesting that we are hard wired to think apocalyptically.
Interesting stuff.
If your threat model predicts a high probability of nuclear war, civilization-threatening pandemics, or other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios, you should probably move to a defensible rural homestead with solar panels, a long growing season, and a fresh water supply -- that's an hour away from the nearest interstate. I hear the intermountain west is nice this time of year.
What's interesting is that few prepper/survivalist discussions -- that I've seen, maybe I'm missing them -- mention the opportunity costs of moving to the backwoods. I interviewed Y2K prepper/survivalists who quit their jobs and followed approximately the above advice. The problem arises when the collapse, well, doesn't happen. And you're two hours (in the summer) and six hours (in the winter) from the nearest emergency room.
Also once you sell that city condo or suburban house and move to your self-sufficient rural homestead, you then have a strong incentive to predict the collapse is coming. Maybe it's not going to be Y2K after all, but how about suitcase nukes in big cities? Or bioterror? Etc. There's also a subset of religious survivalists who seem to want an ungodly and immoral secular society to meet its doom; I wrote about this for Wired here: http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/1719...
At least one of those is, essentially, already in-progress. At least one of those is, essentially, a farce.
Determining which is which is left as an exercise for the reader.
...except one of the morals of the Noah story is that nothing but God can help you when God calls your number (1). Prepping for the big one isn't a very biblical idea. The general advice of the Bible is that you could be dead in an hour, so preparing your soul for eternity is way more important than a bag of flour (Luke 12:16-21).
Being ready for hurricanes or what-have-you would fall under general wisdom, I guess. But I don't think it's directly addressed in the Bible.
(1) There's also the moral that God wants to redeem humanity despite its flaws. It's not a bleak story, fundamentally.
For an analogy, there are speculations that the mythological story about “Helen of Troy” relates to customs of basically… kidnapping women in raids (they were a seafaring culture) at the time Homer was writing. So, we get information about the morality of the culture doing the writing but also information about earlier events.
For a repetition of the pattern, the trojan war itself was fought by people of a culture had already “collapsed,” followed by a dark age and was in the process of rebooting. They were transcribing oral traditions and that’s why we know the Homeric stories today, the writings of the early revivalists.
Maybe Homer’s great grandma had a basement full of canned soup and a nice cabin in a strategic location.
There are undoubtedly people with a few weeks' supply of food, but that would be because they live in remote areas or islands and may suffer weather related disruption.
The American prepper rarely says it, but seems to be afraid of civil breakdown, perhaps in the form of some race war.
Prepper supply companies see big dollar signs in reinforcing that; "don't rely on your neighbors, don't look to local governments to organize for you, watch out only for yourself! Oh, and buy a bunch of stuff to make sure you'll survive!!"
For decades now we've been hit with this marketing propaganda, and it divides us politically, makes some people waste a ton of money on prepper supplies, all of which (as usual) enriches business interests big and small.
Obviously, both looking at it historically and just plain thinking about it, we all have to work together (excepting those rare few who really live totally off the grid, in the middle of nowhere) to get civilization back in order.
The question of what happens if two preppers or groups of preppers decide to "secure" the same Walmart is not addressed either.
White people "find" things in the aftermath of a disaster, black people "loot" them.
Here's an example:
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blkatrinaloot...
As someone who's lived all over the US, this description is quite accurate in rural areas. Americans (and, I suspect, people in most sparsely populated areas) do have a strong culture of rugged individualism.
Take someone from rural Idaho or Montana and drop them off in the mountains with a gun and a knife, and I'll put money on them surviving.
We all live in community of one scale or another, excepting, like I said, those rare few who live entirely off the grid. We're not just individuals, we're also members of that community. That's part of the human condition.
It just makes a lot of business sense to propagandize the individualism (so we buy more junk we don't need, placidly take working conditions instead of banding together to change them, etc), so that's what you see.
Most places I've lived, I've made an effort to get to know people, and I'd trust them to pick up my mail, I'd feel like I could pull together with them.
But, I've always lived in medium-to-large cities, and mostly in apartments, so from my perspective, this image of cities-as-isolating-rural-as-friendly seems more like a sentimental anti-city caricature than anything matching reality.
(+) 3,500 casualties over a 30 year period including 1,000 military and law enforcement; slightly more than 9/11 or comparable to ten years of Detroit homicide rate. The Troubles are a good example of how bad things can get with a divided community, unequal law enforcement, and violent imposition of public order.
http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=41.87811...
A 1/4 cow will get you that much in ground beef alone, plus the steaks and roasts and stuff. I think the last one I got was 100+ lbs. Half a pig is 60-100lbs. Either of these will fit in a small chest freezer with room to spare.
Hell, we bought 25 lbs of salmon last year from a guy who goes to Alaska in the summers to fish.
Chickens, the most cost, effort, and space effective food animals need about .1lb/day of grain, in addition to forage and kitchen scraps. For that, you'll get eggs and occasionally, chicks. FWIW, I've had chickens for 5 years, and the first chick hatched yesterday. If you've got young hens, you might get .75 egg/day/hen. As they age, that goes down. All in costs are probably O($0.50)/egg.
Laying hens will start laying after 4-6 months, then be productive for another year, and start to tail off for the next year or two. They're 3-4lb birds before cleaning.
On the gripping hand, there is the excess rooster problem, commonly solved with coq au vin.
The only thing that helps in that situation is being highly resourceful, adaptable, and having survival training. I'm sure an SAS-trained individual with more more than a pair of underpants would hold up a lot better than one of these families that, due to circumstances beyond their control, can't access their cache.
Uhhhhh ... NO.
The only thing that helps in that situation is a plane ticket to somewhere else. People die because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. We don't have time travel yet, but we can sure as hell get out of dodge.
If you've got foresight then you have options.
Anyway, I wasn't necessarily restricting you to air travel. Take a boat. Or a car. Or walk on your own two feet.
When things turn to shit, people get out. They don't go into their bunkers with their canned food. That's stupid.
I'm probably not alone in saying my emergency supply consists of a bunch of uneaten Soylent sitting neglected in a low cupboard. I also live in Seattle, where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are a real threat. So really, I ought to start taking my own advice here.
I agree with general disaster preparedness. You should have a few weeks worth of water/food, and a flash light on hand in case of a natural disaster.
MMM on preppers: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/03/03/why-we-are-not-rea...
And some people assign a large enough negative utility to dying in an emergency that it makes sense for them to spend a substantial amount of money preparing for an emergency.
One rationally allocates resources so as to maximize expected utility; if an emergency has a very high negative utility, and an agent believes they can substantially minimize the utility loss by preparing thoroughly, it may work out for them to spend a fair amount of money preparing for a hypothetical emergency.
Anyone have thoughts on whether or not a good natural disaster kit should include weapons?
Though I suspect that in any sort of emergency where the scenario resembles TEOTWAWKI, SHTF, etc, a big proportion of the robbing bands will be preppers who find out the hard way that the only thing in the stash that works as expected is the assault rifle.