Sunday, January 22, 2012

Being prepared makes you part of a 'subculture'.

When I was a kid, my grandmother always had 6 or 8 months worth of canned goods, soap, toilet paper, and food staples, flour, sugar, salt, etc in her cupboard. She'd raised my father and uncle all through the Depression and WWII. Her stockpile was the difference in normalcy or hunger on a number of occasions. Does keeping that stockpile make her 'smart' or does that make her 'scary'?
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Everything I read about history shows me that people kept root cellars, they fertilized with animal 'droppings', they 'hoarded', and often hid, flour, rice, grains, animal feed. They did that because their futures were never certain. War, boom, bust, famine and death was around every corner.
It was a way of life that everyone understood.
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Most of us here have admitted to some of that same 'hoarding'. And for the same reasons our ancestors did. It looks like war, boom, bust, famine and death are around every corner. But now, doing these things, i.e., preparing for possible problems tomorrow makes you (and me) part of a 'subculture'. How sad, and foolish, is it that people think what they have today, cannot be gone tomorrow?
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When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon.

"In an instant, anyLinkthing can happen," she told Reuters. "And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared."

Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as "preppers." Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

Preppers, though are, worried about no government.

Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a "survival center," complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon.

"I think this economy is about to fall apart," she said.

A wide range of vendors market products to preppers, mainly online. They sell everything from water tanks to guns to survival skills.

Conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck seems to preach preppers' message when he tells listeners: "It's never too late to prepare for the end of the world as we know it."

"Unfortunately, given the increasing complexity and fragility of our modern technological society, the chances of a societal collapse are increasing year after year," said author James Wesley Rawles, whose Survival Blog is considered the guiding light of the prepper movement.

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I've been to Rawles site. It's pretty good, but there are many others just as good or better. But I didn't start saving for hard times, I found Rawles site, and others, BECAUSE I was already in that mode of thought.
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How about you? Are you preparing BECAUSE of guys like Beck and Rawles, or are you reading them because you were already convinced bad days are directly ahead?
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Schteveo

3 comments:

Spider said...

All you need to do is remember the Boy Scouts motto. It's good advise in everything you do.

What the govt. (ie. the left) is trying to do is make these folks sound like dangerous, out-of-the-norm, people. Remember how the left turns anything into something bad. The first thing they do is demonize it. The MSM will take it from there.


IMO, i don't ever recall this country being pushed to the brink of another revolution as it is now. That's not to say that i believe most Americans, or even many Americans, would take part in it if it came to that. But i know lots of normal, regular, everyday people who sense "something" is coming and are preparing. I guess it all depends on the outcome of the next election.

A. Levy said...

Being perpared is simply the act of an intelligent person. It always makes sense, especially in bad times.

Obviously, this is an attitude that worries those who believe in a large and all-powerful government, as it lessons the amount of control that government has over it's people. Can you think of a better reason to be prepared?

Anonymous said...

"In America, Soros predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether..."

Even he knows.