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, anything 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