More than a few people have asked me how I got into prepping and survivalism. For me, it boiled down to Murphy’s Tenth Law:
Mother Nature is a bitch.
In 2011, my wife and I (Thing One and Thing Two hadn’t been born yet) managed to luck out when two natural disasters hit where we live. Winter brought us the largest snowstorm on record for northern Illinois, and summer brought us a derecho, which is a Spanish word for “What the #%$@ just tore the roof off the house?”
Unlike a lot of people, we didn’t lose power, and we didn’t run out of food, because we were lucky. Given that we hadn’t lost our jobs in the Great Recession several years earlier, I realized that we had been riding an incredible streak of lucky sevens. But, as the saying goes, luck only gets you so far. Luck isn’t a plan.
The book that changed everything
Because I was an avid reader before my time got eaten up writing books, I looked for general preparedness books and stumbled upon How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It, by James Wesley, Rawles.
It changed my life. (Here is the link to buy it on Amazon, but Rawles has a new book coming out later this month.) The book helped me realized how truly helpless I’d be in the event of a significant disaster:
- My home defense, excluding kitchen knives and a baseball bat, consisted of a .38-special revolver and one box of ammunition.
- My wife is an operating room nurse, but our medical supplies consisted of a box of Band-Aids, a bottle of ibuprofen and some cough medicine.
- Aside from a weather-alert radio – anyone who lives in the Midwest and doesn’t own one is a fool – we had no backup information source.
- We had barely enough batteries on hand for either the radio or our cheap plastic flashlights.
In short, if the world went to the dogs, I’d be covered in barbecue sauce and wearing Milk-Bone boxers. I had no excuse.
Slowly but surely, step by step, we became a lot more prepared. I won’t say we fixed the problem, because there’s always room for improvement. And as I’ve warned in previous posts, don’t fall victim to panic buying, and don’t buy cool-looking stuff you don’t need.
And remember – this is important – that skills are always more important than stuff. If you buy a $2,000 AR rifle platform with all the trimmings, and you can’t hit the broad side of a barn because you’ve never taken it to the range, you’re doing it wrong.
A final thought
You’re reading this for a reason. Maybe you’re into preparedness and you stumbled on my site. Maybe you went to school with me, and you’re wondering whether I’ve lost my marbles.
But let me ask you this: If you’re watching our nation crumble all around us, and you’re telling yourself that everything’s gonna be all right in spite of what your own eyes and ears are telling you, are preppers crazy, or are you?