The Preparedness and Survival Site

More and more articles are coming out in the press about people that are making the change and deciding that they should take direct responsibility for the well-being of themselves and their families.  Newsweek is the latest to feature an article on what they are calling “preppers”, and they have a very interesting take on the movement that has been steadily growing.

And while they may not envision themselves as Kevin Costner in Waterworld—in fact, many preppers go out of their way to avoid the stereotypes that come along with the “survivalist” label—they’ve made a clear-eyed calculation about the risks at hand and aren’t waiting around for anybody else to fix them.

This is goodness, this is what this site and others like it have been promoting all along. It does not have to be full on nuclear warfare, biological warfare, or a 2km asteroid hitting the earth, most of what should be focused on are the immediate threats to you and your family. These days that means being unemployed, natural disasters, economic disruptions, etc. There is a long list of things that can go wrong that have nothing to do with the end of the world.

Some preppers fear the complete breakdown of society, while others simply want to stock up on extra granola bars and lighter fluid in case of a blackout or a storm. Hard-core survivalists might think of preppers as soft; “Eventually, the Chef Boyardee is going to run out,” jokes Cody Lundin, the founder of the Aboriginal Living Skills School, a survival camp based out of his home in Prescott, Az. But prepping, says Martin, is just a new word for a very old way of life. “You don’t have to have a survival retreat loaded with guns secluded in the wilderness to be a prepper,” adds David Hill Sr., 54, a former jet mechanic who runs the Web site WhatisaPrepper from his home in rural West Virginia. “There are many people who live in urban and suburban areas who don’t own guns who also identify themselves as preppers.“

The last sentence is one to note, this is important. This means that the mentality of taking care of you and yours is starting to sink in. Yes, the entitlement crowd will always be out there, TV raised them to expect everything to be neatly wrapped and delivered at their beck and call. But, the fact that more “average” people are changing their perceptions to align with the known fact that  “you need to be able to take care of yourself” is a very heartening thing to see.

FEMA’s new head under Obama, Craig Fugate, has encouraged Americans to get in touch with their inner survivalist. “I encourage all Americans to take some simple steps to make their families more prepared, such as developing a family communications plan,” he tells NEWSWEEK. His organization recently launched a “Resolve to be Ready” campaign suggesting that Americans to make preparedness part of their New Year’s resolutions. “I think what people have come to realize is that [organizations like ours] can’t always be everywhere we need to be as quickly as we need to be,” says Jonathan Aiken, a spokesman for the American Red Cross. “So I think the messaging has changed, from FEMA on down, that in the event of an emergency, people need to be prepared to take care of themselves for a couple of days until the rest of us can come out and get to you.”

This is good, trends like this need to continue. One of the things that helped to get the US through the Great Depression was the fact that the US Government encouraged the population to do everything that they could to ensure that everything was used as efficiently as possible, to plant gardens, and do many other things to be self supporting. It was considered a Patriotic Duty to help yourselves and thus help your country. We need that mentality again, Katrina was a perfect example of how things should not be. While there is no single point that can be assigned, rather blame needs to be equally distributed amongst all parties. None were prepared for something like that, the few that lived in the area that were did rather well, those that were not, and did not evacuate as instructed, suffered horribly.

In the end, what it all boils down to, at least for the preppers, is self-reliance—a concept as old as the human race itself. As survival blogger Joe Solomon pointed out in a recent column, during the Victory Gardens of WWII, Americans managed to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables they needed to survive. “My mother’s parents had a 10-acre garden, and my grandfather worked at the dairy farm next door,” says Hill, the former jet mechanic. “They worked by raising their own food, they had their own chickens, they canned vegetables, and my grandfather fed a family of 12 like that.” But in the modern world, he says, many of those skills are easily forgotten. Today, our food comes from dozens of different sources. Most of us aren’t quite sure how electricity gets from the wires to our stoves. We use debit cards to buy a can of tuna and we wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to filter contaminated water. We are residents of the new millennium; we simply haven’t needed to prepare.

The skills referenced above are not just “easily” forgotten, they have been forgotten in most cases. This is a scary reality, modern society has done an excellent job of un-teaching some of the most important skills that one can have individually. The “just in time” infrastructure that almost everybody relies on only reinforces that there is not a need for the core skills that built this country, it’s dead wrong. If we don’t need those core skills now, we will sooner or later.

-

The original Newsweek article that the quotes were taken from can be found here: Newsweek – Survivalism Lite

Video that accompanied this article: Survivalism 101

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.