There's more to this subculture than the media stereotypes suggest.
Jesse Walker | February 20, 2013
My friend Ceredwyn Alexander lives on a homestead in the mountains of Vermont. She and her family raise a lot of their own food, from chickens to cabbage, and they heat their home with wood they chop themselves. (She won't live anywhere, she tells me, "without supplemental heat that operates without electricity.") They worry about peak oil. They try not to buy things on credit. They always keep a great deal of food and water and other supplies on hand. If everything goes to hell tomorrow, they want to be prepared.
People who say and do such things are often called preppers, and Ceredwyn willingly applies the term to herself: It's a decent label, she says, for people who try to be prepared for sudden, disruptive emergencies. If you've been absorbing the recent portraits of preppers in the press, where they've been depicted as doomsday-fearing right-wing paranoiacs stocking up on guns and canned goods, you may think you know all there is to know about Ceredwyn. But before you use your stock of stereotypes to fill in those blanks, here's a few more facts about her.
Her politics are liberal and feminist. Her family's firearm collection consists of a single shotgun, which they own in case a four-legged predator passes through. (As I said, she lives in rural Vermont.) She speaks disdainfully about survivalists who spend their time "waiting for the Mutant Zombie Bikers to come take their guns, drugs, and women away." Ask her about survival strategies, and she doesn't start spinning fantasies about a well-provisioned family fending off looters. "When the shit hit the fan during Irene," she says instead, "neighbors were everyone's best resource." Preparedness, she says, requires "learning skills and community involvement...not freeze dried food and razor wire." To those ends, she has joined the volunteer fire department and become the town service officer.".........................
Even that goofy show Doomsday Preppers shows a big cross section of people who prep. One woman stores food so that should disaster strike she can help feed her town.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
Since when is it a crime (moral or otherwise) to be prepared for an emergency? I happen to believe that it's primarily up to me to take care of me and mine, not the Gubment, not my neighbors, and not my fellow man.
Being prepared for most any emergency means taking a hard look at the definition of what "most any emergency" is and what tools, skills, and supplies it takes to be ready for "most any emergency." My list of tools is extensive and firearms and ammo are near the top of the list. Skills?
Many years of learning and perfecting living in primitive conditions and always wanting to learn more about living off the land pay off when bad things happen. Better still, practice what you know in the great outdoors, teach others, and learn what you don't know from others who are willing to teach you.
Maintain supplies and rotate your stock, consume it, give to family and friends, and donate to those who need it most. Buy stock that has an extensive shelf live but don't over look the need for fresh food too. Seeds are a good item to add to you supplies, live stock and fowl too but I'm a few years from being able to become a gentleman farmer. Don't have something you need and/or can't store it? Add items to your supplies that you can barter with, home brewing and distilling supplies, precious metals, gems, fuel, tools, you get the idea.
I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him; better take a closer look at the American Indian." - Henry Ford
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges; When the Republic is at its most corrupt the laws are most numerous. - Publius Cornelius Tacitus
