Public Perception of Prepping, Post Predicament

Started by RadioRay, November 01, 2012, 03:32:59 PM

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RadioRay

I've had a yen for survival skills since I was a very young boy.  I've seen the perception of basic 'survival skills' change from being strictly for military and professional woodsmen to 1970-90's 'survivalism' and finally to 'prepping'.  As our society had been dumbed-down into an ever more specialized and insect like collection of worker-bees, supporting the ruling class of the hive, we've had even the most basic of self reliance skills and instincts bred out of us, riddiculed on TV & movies and have a media which shows virtually anyone with even a few weeks of food, sanitation and water purification as some sort of 'red neck', stupid, slothful, indolent, moron who beats his wife three times daily whether shes 'needs' it or not.

Much of the gentrified northeast uber-urbanite Mecca is under water in some areas, homes burned to the ground in others & looting, while the media only lightly reports it and etc.  Many urbanites have the latest smart phones, designer shoes and illegal Big Gulp sodas (har!) , yet do not have any food in their high rise apartments - and who would, with so many top restaurants to be seen in ?  No water - "Well, that's what we pay the building 'Super' for . . ." .  However, this is changing and quickly! Prepping may not seem as nutty as it seemed last week.  OK - so lessons learned?

It's a rough situation, but fairly light compared to what COULD happen in a national emergency, where help is not a few miles inland.  I am noticing more people mentioning that 'over the protests of my wife/husband, I put away supplies 'for a rainy day' and now they are grateful.'  Or 'So, who's making fun of preppers now?'.  Hopefully, all those people in some wretched situations will serve as a wake-up call that NO - we're not some 'special generation' of people who magically do not need to take care of themselves.  Those who tell us that we should let the government take care of us are nothing more than 'Human Ranchers' trying to keep the cattle (us) doscile and dependent upon THEM until they decide it's time for the drive to market & slaughter.

We have emergency brakes on our cars & insurance - "just in case" , so let's think ahead a bit and put a bit of food away, heirloom seeds for BEFORE the food runs out, alternate water sources and purification and a way to defend our 'things' and families when the usual suspects decide that stealing is still more fun than learning to work for their daily bread. Be a lunatic - learn basic first aid and keep a kit handy. Maybe even become 'one of those radio nuts', so that you have national comms in something the size of a paper back book - and NO commercial infrastructure required.

Remember: If this were an EMP, or a viral outbreak - the NATION would be shut-down, not just a portion of north eastern cities. That would mean that there will be no help.  Become involved locally , preferably with your local emergency responders and disaster management teams. Ham radio is one way, CERT is another and there may be even more ways.  Once they know and trust you, then you have a say in how YOUR community and family will be taken care of in a disaster.  The feral government does not give you that option: they take care of politicians first.

Anyone ELSE reading about succesful prepping helping during this weather emergency & changing attitudes about prepping & etc. post-Sandy?

Your Thoughts?

Wake-Up America -


>de RadioRay ..._ ._

"When we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can."  ~ Matthew Henry

Jim Boswell

Good Point! So sad to see the people hurting. Yes people could better prepaired.
I have been through hurricanes in Texas, most people just can't wrap their head around that level of damage.
This is a wake-up call to everyone, to get yourself ready. We home insurance, but we don't think about a generator that can protect $500. of food in your freezer. Gee, if you have to walk 3 miles to buy a gallon of water, maybe you should consider a becoming a prepper?

raybiker73

I know two preppers who live in the affected areas, and I called them both after things quieted down to make sure they were OK. One is an off-the-grid guy anyway, so for him it's been business as usual, except for the arrival of what he called some "unexpected firewood" in the form of a couple fallen trees. The other one lives in a transition area between suburbs and rural, and is still without power. She's not too worried about it, though, as it's given her a chance to test her preps, and by all accounts she's doing quite well. She says her only worry right now is that even in her neighborhood, she's been seeing a lot of people she doesn't know and hasn't seen before. Both have expressed amazement at how unprepared their neighbors are, some of whom live on restaurant food and barely have a weekend's worth of snack food in their homes.

I think that in the case of a major, long-term event, we'd see the bottom go out of the tub a lot sooner than we had previously expected. It would be a giant mess and it would be almost immediate.

gil

I couldn't agree more. As to the image of preppers, it might improve a little, but I fear, not much, even though more people might store food and useful items. The "public" pictures preppers holding a rifle and wearing plate carriers and mag pouches. To an extent, it is of course true. They do not imagine that they would have to defend their food against looters. They, of course, wouldn't last a month.

"Preppers" image is better now that the term has changed from "survivalist." which became synonymous with "right-wing gun nut" or worse. However, a bit of that image has survived (no pun intended).

A way to improve our image would be to mention the term "prepper" when participating in community events. There are plenty of opportunities in Ham Radio. Like "Prepper's Community Emergency Service." You get the drift...
Also, before learning more about Ham Radio, I had no idea you could send a radiogram. I still don't know how to do it. Nobody knows they can communicate that way! It should be common knowledge. We wouldn't have to worry about our bandwidth diminishing in that case.. It would make a great short TV news report. Stranded Grandma sending a radiogram to her son to pick her up, the Ham operator has a prepper's banner on top of his radio... Gee, I sound like a politician  ::)

Gil.

KC9TNH

First, Ray, glad to see you back posting and gil, here's the raison d'etre for forum. :)

Few thoughts from what was heard via a couple of nets, some folks who?ve posted about their experiences, and some observations from not a few exercises that involved leveraging mutual-aid agreements with local communities in what?s generally called ?Defense Support to Civil Authority.? (keep your tinfoil, you may want to bake a potato the old fashioned way)

The quintessential HF vignette was a young man who checked in from the belly of the beast with his sloper, and a barefoot Icom due to no cell, no DC-powered dialtonek, no TV, no phone no pool no pets, no nuthin?. But it worked. He had batteries, knew what kind best powered his rig and as soon as the cloud cover broke was able to recharge them with less than optimum ambient light. As they partook of stockpiled food by candlelight snuggled in the dark they were happy because they?d survived. OK, true, but fairy tale over.
Lessons learned from some other reports run the gamut. If you have some other person in your decision-making process as to whether being prepared gets you funny glances, share the tales of this one so they can support rather than ridicule you. And two makes quicker work of anything you tackle. That means brains as well.

If you?re relying on stocked shelves for food, going to that for a sustained period of time ? in essence changing from balanced healthy eating to field rations ? can do nasty things to your digestive system. Do some research on that.  Keep your water supply in appropriate containers, not what you put in your Camelbak 6 months ago ? see above for consequences of that and multiply by lack of sanitation. Can you spell Imodium?

Most commercial cell towers are capable of taking tremendous straight-line winds ? commo infrastructure usually goes down because the on-ground support stuff has been nailed ? no AC for the other gear, switching center under water. You might be shocked at how many single points of failure (SPOF) there are.

If you are basically a shelter-in-place dude/dudette give some thought to your home generator and get a serious assessment of what is the most vulnerable power source for it. Many of the fixed models run on your natural gas which may still be in service where traditional fuels are not. If you need gasoline for anything, find/make yourself a means to pump it out of a tank if needed and train that skill. Generators running on your local gas (again, if available) don?t need to be re-started in the middle of the frickin? night and they are QUIETER (more about that).

A vignette from someone who also came through noticed that having neighbors is good, but good if you KNOW each other.  That could mean the next door neighbor, or the gent 2 hills over. While the area sported lots of out-of-staters coming in to help, it also evidenced roaming people, people who simply looked out of place ? wolves. Listen to your spidey senses.

He also noticed after the storm walking outside one night how quiet things were ? EXCEPT he could listen and absolutely pinpoint those who had power because they had a generator running with that traditional gas-fed hardly-muffled engine. The wolves have good hearing too.

In a REALLY big situation, the Nat?l Guard may not have enough people to provide as much anti-looting security as people would like. They may be victims as well and for many their family trumps their oath. They simply won?t show up because they can?t. Anyone remember how many local officers showed up immediately following Katrina?  Anyone think their houses were exempt?

Plan smart ? and include a means to keep what you have because the grasshoppers nowadays will go looking for the ants who were thinking.

RadioRay

It is happening -  the vast majority of responses on the blogs are saying:

'Sorry that you are hurting right now, but. . . three days without shopping is not an emergency.'

'You had days to leave or prepare and did nothing. Decades of your 'gun control' regulations to make certain that you're disarmed, now you're living in fear of looters. The good news is that Mayor Bloomberg outlawed Big Gulp sodas - so that should help while he sponsors the New York Marathon.'

In Short - big government is not the solution - it is the symptom of this dependency mind set and those with this dependency mind-set HATE those of us who do not. 

The emperor has no clothes.




>de RadioRay ..._ ._
"When we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can."  ~ Matthew Henry

raybiker73

Yep, it has been very interesting reading blog and news story comments. There's a general feeling across all the comments that the people who think like "us" are getting fed up with the people who act like "them," and understandably so. Three days ought not an emergency make, and the helplessness of these people isn't garnering sympathy so much as it is scorn. The best comment I've seen so far was, "The helping hand you so desperately seek is at the end of your own damn wrist."

RadioRay

#7
Hey Ray -

That is a good quote.  A buddy of mine replied that thre are people in this world so dependent upon others that they can be "trapped" on an escalator.  I know people like that - a friend of mine used to call them 'Systemites'.

Here's a fun illustration of the problem.

http://youtu.be/uVN-7h4YiAs


>Ray
"When we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can."  ~ Matthew Henry

gil

I've seen it over and over in group survival shows. Half of the group does all the work, the other half does nothing and waits for the others to feed them. Pathetic. That's how the socialist systems of Europe work. Same here, but to a lesser extent. When there is a real emergency however, those who are prepared will take care of their own...

Gil.

White Tiger

#9
Regarding Prepping I'm 100% on board with prepping as a way of life - although Im new to it, like I do most things, I read up on the topic before investing physical labor - I can say that at some point, natural events, economic uneasiness, political unrest, finally began affecting my consideration about my ability to remain employed.

...when it becomes first person personal, you jump in.

I didn't lose my livelyhood, but it has been severely affected - the point is - there WAS a warning, and I heeded it. I have found that while there is ALWAYS a warning, most people just ignore it. The guy from SurvivalPodcast, Jack Spirco, calls it "normalcy bias"... Not sure if he coined the phrase (doubt it) but the way he uses it indicates people are so stressed and so invested in the current system, it becomes easier to "stay in the Matrix".

Regarding formal volunteering: I read Ray's response about working with organizations - as a Prepper, I'm leery of that. Volunteer organizations have changed their missions - they have an agenda - but it doesn't always resemble those things they were organized for. I don't mean to imply, NOT to be helpful, I mean to say...why do we need to sign up for an organized group to offer assistance? Or, of you desire to join RACES or ARES (to name a few) - maybe your local groups are better than those I have recently been exposed to? I'm not inclined to take orders any more - and I don't want to volunteer for radio work only to be assigned to issuing blankets down at the shelter. I'm sorry if that sounds rude, it's just the way it is. If I want to volunteer for something generic, I'll do it through my church or other private group.

That's probably just due to my issues - just be careful - too many militant former military types looking to be apart of an organized structure...that tend to frown on my Prepper status.

It's why I have come here - Ive learned a lot from some really smart folks. - it's filling the purpose for which I was curious.

Luck WA4STO and I have numerous discussions on this topic - he worked for a couple of key amateur groups and his experience is MUCH more detailed than mine...but similar....and I believe his advice is "be careful".
If you're looking for me, you're probably looking in the wrong place.

RadioRay

The change of mission can be a problem.  The advantage that we have here, is that we're not important enough for 'federal assistance' so we're on our own, which is how we like it.   

>>>  I DO understad your beeing leery of being used as unpaid KGB by the politicians.  They use 'us' against 'us' all the time and enjoy watching us kill each other.



73 de Raye
"When we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can."  ~ Matthew Henry

White Tiger

Amen!

I'm trying to refuse to participate in the game...the only way to opt out of the matrix is to be non-threatening...and don't draw attention to yourself.
If you're looking for me, you're probably looking in the wrong place.

KC9TNH

Quote from: RadioRay on November 02, 2012, 07:44:55 AMThe good news is that Mayor Bloomberg outlawed Big Gulp sodas - so that should help while he sponsors the New York Marathon.'

The emperor has no clothes.

>de RadioRay ..._ ._
He should dress for the weather. Bloomers took a boatload of heat today by MSM for people who were in hotels on their dime with no home, portable lighting being used when districts were w/o power, and trailers for athletes et al while some worried about a polling place out of the weather.

Bloomers decided to cut his losses and now the marathon is cancelled.
I'm sure his motives are puke, er, I meant 'pure' -
dang, did I just send that in the clear?


White Tiger

Quote from: KC9TNH on November 02, 2012, 10:02:52 PM
dang, did I just send that in the clear?

Hah...I do that a lot myself....sometimes followed by a complete rewrite.

...but only of my more strident posts.
If you're looking for me, you're probably looking in the wrong place.