I restocked on some household staples the other day and, as often happens, the guy hauling the cases of food from the ‘special order’ repository asks what I’m buying all this stuff for. And, as of late, I’m deadly honest with them…”I’m one of those crazy survivalist types. Stocking up against price increases and supply issues.” No lie, thats what I say.
And every single time, the other person has come back with something along the lines of “Yeah, I do that too. I just bought a couple cases of….”
Every. Single. Time.
So, mi amigos, don’t feel that you’re alone in this world as you push your shopping cart with 48 cans of tomatoes and 50-pound sacks of rice through the Kroeger. It is a virtual certainty that you are amongst your own kind and you don’t even recognize it.
As I pointed out to someone the other day, for the last thirty years I’ve been viewed as some sort of right-wing, anti-government, Montana survivalist….but lately I’m viewed more as a prophet.
As the world gets weirder and weirder, with dystopian tropes becoming tomorrow’s headlines, absolve yourself from any self-doubt or self-consciousness about what you’re doing in the name of resilience and being prepared. When your neighbor is selling his jet ski to pay the light bill, pulling his kids out of private school to afford to eat, and brown bagging his lunch to his new-job-at-a-lower-wage-because-thats-all-that-was-available, you can pat yourself on the back and take some pride in what you’ve done, and are still doing, to secure the safety of yourself and your loved ones.
Rock on with your bad self, fellow survivalist.
I communicate with preparedness-minded individuals who are scattered from the West Coast to the East Coast. I have said that I felt like “Jeremiah crying out in the wilderness” as I predicted the hard times that were coming. Like a Jehovah’s Witness knocking on doors and handing out “Watch Towers,” I’ve been urging people to “come to Jesus” and to re-double their preparedness efforts before it is too late.
Even those who have only made half-hearted preparedness efforts don’t think that I am as crazy now as they did two and a half years ago Given that so much of what I’ve urged people to prepare for has actually become reality in the past two years, I am now feeling like another personage in the Bible. As a latter day “Moses,” I am trying to lead “my people” to a modern day, figurative, Promised Land where they can reap the benefits of their prepardness efforts–the fruit of their blood, sweat, and tears–which will allow them to avoid the worst effects of even harder times that are likely coming.
I’m a rural Tennessean. Mom came from poor Kentucky farmers; Dad was oldest son of a sometime-sharecropper in East Texas. On both sides of the family, when you can, you stock up on food, against hard times. It’s just sensible.
I grew up that way, & I’m still that way. Never once occurred to me to feel alone–or anything else, particularly–about it. Just ordinary life.
In a Great Depression (what an oxymoron) the family that still has a house not in grave danger of repo, food on the table, decent morals and trusted friends are the RICH. Having a nice garden and healthy critters is a nice bonus.
The rest are just scrabbling about hoping their credit cards don’t get canceled, including that “wealthy family” with all the toys down the road.
No one asks hereabouts. (It’s a city mouse/country mouse thing, I think.)
My standard answers are “running a catering business”, or “church picnic” (which are both true), the few times it has come up.
It’s the polite version of “Nunya…”
I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt showing his idea of the definition of “Covidiot.” It said something like “A person who stocks up on things that other people might need.” In other words, A Covidiot is a hoarder.
It doesn’t matter whether the panic is due to stimulus real or imagined. If the panic results in zero toilet paper, you’re not getting any toilet paper. Mister, if you see a situation going to hell and just sit there and say “It’ll be OK in a day or two,” Then the idiot is wearing the shirt!
My coworkers used to joke about my prepping. When the COVID panics began, more than one of them told me “I’ll never laugh at you again…”
As a satellite TV tech i get to go to allot of houses. Im often need to go into basements,crawlspace I’ve even seen a couple of indoor shooting ranges of the basements of houses. There are allot more people preped that you think. Once I was in a crawlspace and the people had over 50 cases of costco toilet paper. I’ve seen an entire loft of a garage full of 5 gallon buckets of wheat rice and beans. The couple told me they were getting ready to donate it all to the local food back as they were in their 80’s and their kids had no interest in being a survivalist.
Since I try to be low profile, my stock answer to that sort of question is “Boy Scouts are a hungry bunch!”.
Both true, and irrelevant to my shopping list.