I was jawboning with a fella the other day and he mentioned something that I thought was amusing enough to repeat. He’s been wading in the shallow end of the preparedness pool for a few years, but only in the last year or so has he jumped into the deep end with both feet. He’s definitely of the opinion that he’s working against the clock on this one. Anyway, when Bin Laden was killed (or not killed, depending on if you have the shiny side or the dull side of the tinfoil on facing inside your hat) a friend of his called him up with the usual opening line of “Have you seen the news? Quick, go turn on your tv!”. He said at that moment he thought his buddy was calling him to tell him that the end of the world had started and all he could think was “Dammit, I’m not ready!” as every little detail he had unfinished came to him in a moment of perfect, clear recall.
I hate those moments.
I had them 1994 when the Assault Weapons Ban went through and I instantly had a mental image of exactly how many ‘high capacity’ magazines I had. And I thought to myself, “I’m not ready for this!” Fortunately, these moments dont happen often and when they turn out to be ‘false alarms’, as in the case of the fella in the first paragraph, it gives us a ‘whew!’ moment where we think we avoided a disaster and maybe we really should put off the vacation to the Grand Canyon this year and sink the money into freeze drieds and solar panels.
Everyone has a different idea about what flavor the apocalypse is going to be. The superstitious say it’ll be based on some religious prophecy (and, hey, howd that work out lately?), the Peak Oil crowd say its happening right now and we all need to go buy mules and leather harnesses for plows, the Scientologists (really a subset of the first group) figure its the Warth Of Xenu, and guys like me figure its a slow economic descent into a Soviet-era style of toilet paper lines and entropic failure. All of them, though, figure that its happening soon.
I’ve been kinda sorta waiting for something to happen for…mmmm…well, quite a while. Sometimes things that I’d think were catalysts for TEOTWAWKI turn out to be nothing, and sometimes stuff I never even considered comes outta left field and makes me think “hmmm…hadnt thought about that”.
So if you got one of those phone calls tomorrow, and you had that momentary flash of insight where all the things you have left undone and on the ‘to do’ list suddenly pop into your head, would you also think “I’m not ready” or would you think youre ‘ready enough’? I’d say we’re not as ready as we could be, but probably ready enough for most situations. There is, naturally, room for improvement.
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Speaking of room for improvement:
Man sacrifices self to save wife in tornado.
This fella is being lionized as an ideal husband who sacrificed himself to save his wife and is a role model that all husbands should emulate.
As my wife would say: WTF?
Lets assume for a moment that the role of the husband in the marriage is indeed to protect the family. Personally, I’m not a big fan of rigid gender roles in a relationship, but your mileage may vary…..however, lets say for the purpose of this discussion, it is the role of the husband to protect the family.
So, did this guy live up to that responsibility? Well, technically, yes. But if he was really going to protect his family, why didnt he take the steps to protect them from the predictable threat of a tornado? Sacrificing your life to save your family is noble, but it shouldnt be “Plan A”. His wife, I’m sure, wishes that his duty to protect her would have been fulfilled by having a stocked storm shelter where she could yell at him later for building that ugly thing in their yard, but at least he’d be alive for her to yell at.
Sure, maybe sometimes theres simply no other options but it sounds like if these people had a small storm shelter to retreat to theyd both be around today.
If I contrast life ten years ago with life now, the diminishing expectations factor is very high. I sometimes think we are living , right now, in the times we’ve been preparing for. It’s just that it isn’t dramatic, it’s slow and insidious. Every day, it’s a little worse than it was the day before. The aggregate of enough days will result in the whole system just grinding to a halt. Entropy indeed.
I suspect the guy you were talking about did the best he could. It would have been better if he’d had options, but for a lot of people just getting by is all they can manage right now.
I’m of the opinion that the end of the world isnt going to be like flipping a switch where we go to bed as a first-world country and wake up in Mad Max-ville. I think its going to be a gradual descent that when we get to the bottom (or close to it) we’ll look around and think it happened overnight.
Let’s imagine that you pass away comfortably in your bed many years from now, wife by your side and dog by your feet. Toilet paper and fresh fruit and vegetables are still readily available daily at your local grocery store. Hi-cap magazines are still legal, and ammo is available at Walmart 6 days out of 7. Gas is 10 bucks a gallon and silver is $70 an ounce, but hey, that was probably gonna happen anyhow.
So basically–if you die comfy in your home and the S never hits the F, do you leave this world with any regrets on how you lived your life and spent your efforts?
No. None whatsoever. It’s no different than, at the moment you die, worrying that the money you spent on homeowners insurance, flood insurance, disability insurance and car insurance was a waste. Those things allowed me to enjoy my life better because the risks were reduced/mitigated or transferred elsewhere. My goal is to die happy, warm, well-fed, and comfortable without having had to use any of my supplies.
“Sacrificing your life to save your family is noble, but it shouldnt be “Plan A”. His wife, I’m sure, wishes that his duty to protect her would have been fulfilled by having a stocked storm shelter where she could yell at him later for building that ugly thing in their yard…”
Yup. Most of my friends think I’m nuts, and chide me all the time. I can live with it.
Right now on Drudge the top 12 stories are of riots, gang fights and shootings that happened over the Memorial Day weekend.
I think the slow descent scenario is most likely, with the collapsing economy driving the decline.
A lot of preppers have died of old age. And their are too many scenarios for even a fraction of them to be correct about how it comes about.
I have not done a count, but there has been a large number of historical collapses to societies. We know the famous ones (Rome, Maya) but there are collapses that we barely even know about only a few ruins left behind. If you take the collapses we know about, many of them were pretty fast, and many of them were either gradual or at least episodic in nature. Many of them were partial.
As an example, collapse through pandemic tends to be fast, but only partial. The economic collapses seem to be of the slow strangle variety, collapses that feature secondary invasion/migration (Dark Age Greece) start slow, but then are fast and the one-two punch appears to be pretty complete.
And that is only a portion of the historical types that have occurred.
Can’t answer whether the guy did right or wrong in saving his wife during a tornado or whether he should’ve built a storm shelter in his backyard in preparation for a tornado. The important thing is he did something rather than nothing.
What I would pass on for your consideration and “comes out of left field” is to read the book One Second After. Raised in the “duck and cover” generation, and having a full appreciation of what this book conveys, hit gave me alot of “food for thought” of something that could happen immediately with no warning and no slow descent. It is fiction BUT is based on actual historical events. There is an old adage people need to consider, and this book reinforces it, “those who ignore the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.”
Enjoy your website.
Read it. I’ve pretty much read them all, I think.
I have a few small criteria that give me “load the mags-itis” If the lights go out in New York city- and they’ve already blinked several times.
If the currency go into hyperinflation.
Any kind of “Wealth” confiscation that involves gold, guns, or storage goods.
Henry Kissinger said that a nation is controlled thru it’s currency and energy policies; and that people are controlled thru food.
So I guess I’m lost somewhere between “Atlas Shrugged” and “Soylent Green”.