Susie570":vkhxmgka said:
I don't, by any means, think that everyone who preps is a nutcase, I've just known too many who ARE. My boyfriend likes to watch those shows, sometimes, about like... those extreme prepper reality shows. Ugh. They just make my skin crawl. Sometimes I'm able to find humor in them though.
I've never watched those shows, but from what I've read of them it seems like the producers go out of their way to make the people they feature seem as extreme as possible. I've read that people who may be a tad more prepping-oriented than any of us is end up looking like total loonies through the magic of editing and the manipulation of questions. You know how you can be asked a question to which there is no right answer (e.g., "Have you stopped beating your wife?"). These people get asked manipulative questions, they answer without realizing how their answer sounds, etc. Not that all of it is that way, I'm sure some of them actually are pretty nuts.
Unfortunately, featuring the nuts (and making the non-nuts look nuts) serves to make anybody who wants to grow their own food and protect their families from the most common sorts of crimes look like nuts, too. Which is probably exactly what the media wants to do... just like the bullies in school, they marginalize and make fun of people who are different and who think for themselves.
From what I've read on RT, people here who are concerned about preparedness are not trying to build bunkers and fortresses from which they can wage their own private war against the entire US military. They're just trying to get to a level of preparedness which, as MSD pointed out, used to be normal until very recently. Most of us had great-grandparents who canned everything in sight, and had at least a year's stash of shelf-stable food and a root cellar full of cabbages, beets, apples, carrots, and potatoes.
As I said in the sidebar of my old blog:
Look... People think that those who talk about emergency preparedness are paranoid loonies. What they don't realize is that you don't have to believe that society as a whole will break down in order to have a reason to prepare. You just have to believe that at some point, some life-disrupting event might occur. Like a hurricane. An earthquake. A tornado that takes out the local grocery store. A job loss. Standing in the blistering sun in a FEMA line is not the best you can do. Why not have extra put aside, stored away against hard times? Our grandparents and great-grandparents used to do this. They'd be the first to tell you that it isn't crazy talk.
Unlike our great-grandparents, though, we have some additional issues to deal with these days. The surveillance, the attacks on the Bill of Rights, the attempts to nullify parents.
I'm sorry this thread has made you uncomfortable, Suzie... and with your experience, I can certainly understand how it would. I doubt that anyone participating in this thread is in prepper mode all the time, like your ex. Like you, we're seeing some disturbing signs, and realizing that we do not have the skills to weather adverse situations like our great-grandparents could. My great-grandmother would be in full "can everything and what do you mean you don't have a root cellar" mode. But she would be proud that I've learned to sew (though I'm nowhere near her skill), I'm learning to can (though I've just started in that department), I can make bread from scratch, I have my own laying hens and meat rabbits, and I'm learning to garden. My great-grandfather would be perplexed and hastily remedying the fact that my son has never learned to hunt.
When we were still living in an apartment, we had prepared enough that when a hurricane came through and cut us off from the mainland (we were on a peninsula) and downed our power for a week (we were the lucky ones), we were ready. We had a Coleman stove and fuel, and plenty of canned food (in rollaway bins under the beds) and disposable plates, utensils, etc. We also had a big washtub. Didn't have a washboard, though, but that changed very quickly after the storm. We had a plan in place, too. We lived too close to the coast to stay, so we emptied and wiped the refrigerator, leaving it open, filled the chest freezer almost all the way with zipper bags of water and turned it to super-freeze, switched all the breakers off except the one to the chest freezer, and evacuated. When we got back, with the power off, we turned off the freezer breaker and wrapped the freezer in a comforter. It all worked very well.
Unlike then, when we lived just off a major highway, we now live in the middle of nowhere. Even if we didn't want to prepare for other issues, that in itself is enough reason to do some prepping. With our well hand pump, our stored food, our rabbits and chickens, our grill, and our fuel and generator, we could make it for months without power (with wise use of the generator). Not that it would be fun, but we could do it. And out here, it's entirely possible that we would have to go an extended time without power at some point.
It's a great stress reliever to look at that hand pump and all of our stored food and know that we could make it through.
