Are You Prepared?

“Be prepared.” It’s the Boy Scout motto, but few of us think anything about it unless hurricane season is approaching. Then it means setting aside a little extra water and food, keeping the cars gassed up and knowing where your homeowners policy can be found. But we count on so many other things to be OK, and they almost always are. Until they aren’t.

Are you prepared for gasoline to be not just expensive, but unavailable? Are you prepared for a single long blackout, or days of on-and-off blackouts? Are you prepared for lack of phone and Internet service? Are you prepared for schools to be closed? Store shelves to be empty? Transportation to be disrupted? Are you prepared for your credit and debit cards not to work or for even your cash to be worthless paper? Are you prepared for armed people with bad intentions to enter your neighborhood? What if they’re wearing uniforms? What if those uniforms are legitimate? Are you prepared for your tap water to be undrinkable? Your toilet to be unflushable? Ice to cost $25 a bag, if you can get it at all? What do you know about first aid and CPR? Do you know what to do when there’s no mosquito control? Are you prepared to go someplace untouched by some unspecified catastrophe and live there temporarily? Permanently?

What if the economy takes a nasty turn? What if that goes on for years? Is the biggest threat to you consuming local produce or produce that you’ve grown yourself your own lack of gardening skills, your homeowners association, the codex alimentarius, or Monsanto’s schemes? Can you keep an increasingly intrusive government from taking your children if you refuse the latest controversial vaccine? Are you ready to help a neighbor or ask for help yourself? Are you a member of your community, or do you just live in a neighborhood where you don’t know a soul? How will Agenda 21 affect you? Have you anticipated everything you will need to deal with in order to survive?

The show Survivor is a contrived competition, complete with game show host. But real life is played for keeps, with your health, your freedom, your life and your children’s lives and psyches at stake. Back in the 1970s people who looked at all these possibilities and chose to reorder their lives to be ready were called survivalists. They were looked at as anti-government gun nuts who liked to run around in the woods. A decade before, those who put bomb shelters in their backyards were thought of as kooky—and perhaps they were. Today the people looking for the answers to all the questions above are called “preppers” and most of them are fairly normal, if a little better informed than average.

Some of what they know is very frightening. Right now the key risk to understand is not nuclear war or an asteroid impact, it’s economic instability caused by a Europe that overextended itself providing welfare-state goodies and a China that has experienced a decade of overheated growth that had them building entire towns without a homebuyer in sight. If the U.S. suffers along with them, it’s hard to find anyone outside the pit who has the strength to pull up the folks who are in the pit. Right now, Greece and what happens to her people should be watched by everyone. Because what few people know is that compared to our GDP, our debt is worse than Greece’s. Which means that harder times may be coming.

The late Admiral James Stockdale, who endured four years of solitary confinement in a North Vietnamese POW camp, said it was easy to predict which of his fellow detainees would succumb first. They were the optimistic ones who believed they would be home by the next major holiday. You'd better be prepared.