Sunday, May 16, 2010

TEOTWAWKI

Four Great Preparedness Myths, by Dan B. - SurvivalBlog.com
From Guest/Friend "Randomly Hittin' Witten" comes this link to SurvivalBlog.com ("The Daily Web Log for Prepared Individuals Living in Uncertain Times").

The thrust of the article, coming from one who knows and thinks about TEOTWAWKI *, is that "survivorists" or "Preppers" (Prepared For Survival) tend to adhere to one or more of four belief systems which just may be nothing more than "wishful thinking"
  1. "You can defend yourself against the horde" (the folks who haven't prepared for world-wide disaster, and want to take your 'stuff' away from you);
  2. "Stock up on the ammo you'll need to defend yourself with" (you're gonna need lots of ammo to defend yourself against the horde);
  3. "I only need X number of days of food" (surprisingly, the author states that most "preppers" only store a couple of days of food --- then what? They're gonna make a trip to Safeway?)
  4. "TEOTWAWKI will be fun!" (What? Watching your friends and family die horrible lingering deaths will be fun? Your own life will not be ""solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"?)
I think the man has a point. Well, four points. His arguments are persuasive, that, for example, without a functional infrastructure a "lone survivor" will be readily identified by his neighbors and ultimately overwhelmed by them ... no matter the Butcher Bill. After all, they're all starving to death anyway, and everybody has to sleep SOMETIME.

Personally, I'm not into "End-Of-Days" preparedness. And I think some of those who only stock two days worth of food have that same expectation ... if we civilized folks have to live more than two days without an infrastructure, then there is little use in trying to be self-sufficient if Obama won't appear in a sort of Deus Ex Machina last-minute rescue. We're all gonna die anyway, aren't we?

As I said, I'm certainly not a practitioner of "survival preparedness", although I do have the three levels of 'stuff'' to meet emergencies:
  1. What I have in my pockets (knife, flashlight, lighter, etc.)
  2. What I have in my car (clothes, blankets, food, water, tarp, bigger knife, firearm & ammunition, etc.)
  3. What I have in my house (see #2, but more of it, kerosene lamps and a lot of camping equipment)
But heck, that's just basic stuff for getting caught out in the rain, stranded beside the road, the electricity goes out for a few days in the depth of winter.

I don't know ... and I don't much care ... what you have done for your own personal 'emergency preparedness But I suspect that, practically speaking, you may look around and find that you are almost as appropriately prepared as the "Preppers" for TEOTWAWKI".

Oh yeah. Almost forgot.
TEOTWAWKI stands for "The End Of The World As We Know It".

If you don't know that, you can't survive. I'm pretty sure it's in a book somewhere.

Scary, ain't it?