Preppers: I’m ready for anything; economic collapse, zombies, apocalypse, sinkholes, foreign invasion, aliens…anything!
[covid-19 hits]
Preppers: fuck this i’m not wearing a mask! it’s all a hoax!
Also preppers: I need to go to the store and buy 27 cases of toilet paper!
I don’t think preppers are a monolith. There are people from different backgrounds, different politics, different concerns, and different methods (and degrees) of preparedness. People who make it about hoarding goods and resources are probably just doing it wrong.
I’m a person that most people would consider a prepper. What am I prepping for? Unemployment. Being able to survive with as few possible inputs as possible.
I’m a hard core skeptical nerd that doesn’t believe a single conspiracy theory. I’m like an anti doomsday prepper. Making life easier even if things don’t go bad.
So… Yeah, doomsday preppers definitely showed their true colors.
But I think we also saw that there’s a lot of merit to being a reasonable prepper.
I’m lucky to have a reasonable prepper in my friend group. Because of their insistence, I had masks, a full tank of gas, and a comfortably-stocked pantry way ahead of time so I wasn’t yet another person adding stress to a lean/just-in-time/low-margin distribution system that can’t handle even minor hiccups.
Much like the goal of lockdowns was not to completely stop the spread but just slow it so our healthcare system could handle it, the goal of prepping should be to avoid causing shortages when our productive capacity is lowered.
Drag thinks prepping is about learning useful skills and building community. A prepper should know how to sew, how to garden, how to repair and operate a radio, how to make friends, how to organise labour, and first aid.
Drag wants to see a zombie show about a grandma who looks after her community, resolves interpersonal disputes, fixes clothes, and looks after the little ones. Drag thinks grandmas are the demographic best prepared for an apocalypse.
Kickass apocalypse grannies, fuck yeah
Me, buying some extra rice, pasta and salt, watching my neighbor buying large game butchering knife kit (we live in the suburbs)
Sounds like a smart guy. He gets meat AND all your dried goods!
I don’t consider myself a prepper, but I do prepare for unlikely scenarios with highly negative outcomes. In terms of expected value vs. investment, I think having a “go” or “get home” bag is cheap and useful. I have two weeks of food and water supplies to shelter in place. I have face masks and hazmat suits (they came vacuum sealed so they just sit in the bottom of the shelter in place Tupperware bin). A solar generator and battery. A few medkits and some basic medicines including prescription antibiotics. And then my camping/hiking stuff: so more mres, water purification, water filter, fire kit etc.
All in all, it didn’t cost much, it doesn’t take up much room, and it’s good to have. I’m not necessarily worried about a revolution so much as, in order if likelihood: a bad storm, electrical grid issues, natural disaster, or mild civil unrest. All of which I’ve been through before, so I guess they’re not exactly black swan events. I wouldn’t really call those “SHTF” events, since, again, I’ve experienced each one and yet things are now fine.
What I consider “preppers” are thinking about (and seemingly hoping for) civilizational collapse.
Yeah I fill up some whisky bottles with tap water and keep them in the cupboard. I guess in an insane scenario I might need to use it as drinking water, though I’d probably want to figure out how to boil that water first since it’s been sitting there for awhile.
I have actually used that water… but just to wash my hands when they turn off the water in the building when they’re doing some maintenance.
Sometimes some disaster preparedness is just useful for relatively banal circumstances.
Yeah, I feel much the same. Shit happens sometimes and it’s good to be prepared. That goes for situations where civilization is collapsing and also in day to day life too. “Preppers” are so hyper fixated on one particular hyper-individual fantasy outcome. The merits of, say, integrating into a mutual aid network are completely missed.
It’s always so much more useful to have AND KNOW WHERE every one-off necessity you might need is. A flashlight and spare batteries. First aid supplies. Spare medication. Superglue. A good utility knife. Emergency bedding. Enough shelf stable food for a few days. Some card games to pass the time. A few creature comforts that are easy to keep on hand. An appropriate weapon you practice with regularly. Some space an unhoused friend could crash for a week.
You get whatever you can together and organized and then you SHARE IT, because these things will all solve day to day problems for people in your life who maybe don’t have them on hand. And then you pay attention to other needs that come up and make small additions so you’re prepared for the needs of people you care about. And then boom there you go you’ve done actual fucking preparation! And get to sleep a little easier knowing you’re ready for a lot more that life could throw at you.
Margaret Killjoy has a great podcast on effective preparation that comes from a very practical community readiness perspective. Definitely worth a listen. Live Like The World Is Dying
I suppose it depends on where you live and the sorts of things that are likely to happen. For me personally where I live I can’t think of anything that would really require that level of preparation.
My weapon of choice is my razor-sharp wit!
I’m going to die, aren’t I.
Learn to play the recorder, people love music. (Hopefully enough to feed the musician, otherwise I’m gonna starve.)
We’re all gunna die, so no worries! Right? 😮
Hey don’t underestimate it! If that’s what ya got, lean into it if you need to. If you can be quick on your feet and convince someone you’re not worth the trouble that can already keep you out of danger. You can always pick up a more physical weapon later, or that just might not be your thing, you’ll figure what works for you.
I know a guy who owns a retired nuclear missile silo that he made into a doomsday bunker/business. The top several floors or so with the old control rooms and stuff has been converted into his bunker, but most of the main silo is flooded with water, so it’s a scuba diving attraction.
Anyway: when Covid came his bunker and years of food and fuel, so he and the wife went out there and used it for their lockdown. I’m happy for him that he got to use it.
They took out the old control rooms and completely remodeled the inside into a pretty comfy house. It’s just underground and has 3-ton blast doors.
that guys living my dream
Flooded with stagnant water? Do you want brain worms? This is how you get brain worms.
If there’s no sunlight energy providing for phytoplankton, there’s probably not much of a food chain in there to support parasites.
Else cave diving sites would be equally dangerous.
It’s basically aquifer water. When the silo was active they had to run pumps to keep it from flooding. It’s actually one of the ways silos could be identified by satellites. They’d have oversized drainage ponds in the middle of nowhere where they’d be pumping the water.
I’m an inverse prepper I guess
Always ready to just give up and die
There’s a Simpson’s episode about preppers where they assume the big bad thing happens and fuck off to their bunkers, stuff happens, and they eventually come back to town. When they come back everyone is happy and doing fine and Marge says something like “things were okay after the first few hours. We all worked together and made it work. It was like all the mean, angry, and resentful parts of the town had just disappeared!”
See also Emergency Skin by NK Jemison.
my dads a mild prepper and had his ‘told you so’ moment when he brought up 2 boxes of n95 masks. he donated a box to hospital and the other box got the family through the worst months
Cute, but it’s just a single hit on a lifetime of misses for most. He got lucky once and could easily use it to reaffirm a bunch of nonsense instead of crilically asking himself what all the other wasted shit is for.
But hey, I have hobbies too, and I’m glad he’s smart enough to listen to science. So he’s about a million miles ahead of most
They weren’t ready for a SHTF scenario where survival means personal hygiene.
Same people who won’t get a vaccination are the same ones who take huge dumps and don’t wash their hands. Venn diagram is a circle.
I’m proud that in that time of crisis I was strong and served my country and fellow citizens, simply by staying home and not bothering anyone.
The only thing the paranoid preppers did was raise the price of ammunition.
Going back to COVID. one had to wear a MOPP IV suit and decontaminate everything you touch 24/7, including the interior of your car and the ultimate petri dish, your mobile phone. For the folks who grew a beard and wore a mask, FU, you compromised the mask.
My prepping involves knowing how to make beer/whiskey from the dirt up. I figure anything else I can trade from there. Including your women.
I feel like if we’ve got to the point where we go back to bartering, I’ve kind of lost interest in surviving because that means pretty much all of the civilization is gone.
“I need to borrow your gun and one bullet. Actually, I’ll be keeping the bullet, but you can have your gun back when I’m finished.”
Actually, I’ll be keeping the gun and giving you the bullet back… at a really high velocity.
Or ever bother learning something to benefit society now and in the case of a rebuild. Great, you have food, shelter and guns. Do you know how to dress wounds? Do you know how to build a generator? Fuck electricity actually- do you know how to build a steam engine? Wait before we can get here, do you know how to make steel? Cast iron? There should be plenty of it after an apocalypse. Wind copper?
What about welding? Not the kind you need modern tools for, you won’t have those. Do you know basic chemistry to get what you need to restart society? No? Well good luck.
Turns out survival in an apocalypse isn’t all that difficult if you payed attention to anything in school. It pisses me off people get bent out of shape about “useful practice skills like doing taxes aren’t being taught.”
I can remember a ton of important ass survival shit from school. Crop rotation! Agricultural practices from thousands of years ago! Steam power, basic electricity, Simple chemistry. Oh, and Math! How many Preppers can’t do basic fucking math that would save them?
I feel like a lot of stuff from ancient times wouldn’t be all that useful. A lot of stuff back then was optimized for a society that didn’t know anything about electricity.
We know how electricity exists, we know that with some magnets and copper wire we can turn mechanical energy into electricity. It seems like making a wind turbine is something they could’ve made in ancient times, but they didn’t do that simply because they didn’t really know anything about electricity. Some more copper wire and some more magnets and you could drive a pump. Some chemistry and you have a battery, maybe not Li-ion but something that’ll work well enough. Resistors and you can have an electric stove and a heater.
It always strikes me as odd that preparers aren’t all-in on green technology. If you had some wind turbines and/or solar panels and electric vehicles almost nothing other than communications would really change much. Dependency on complex oil refineries is the biggest weakness of our society. If you live in a rural area that has some farming and has green energy and electric vehicles you’re dependent on very little that’s not produced in your community.
You would like Doctor Stone. It’s about a high school science geek who has to restart civilisation from scratch.
I’ll check it out
There was a really good 1970s post-apocalyptic show in the UK called Survivors that dealt with those issues. One episode involved the fact that the only person who knew how to take care of their livestock committed rape and what to do about it. Others involved the just basic drudgery of returning to a medieval life. Really good show (apart from the last episode, which subverts the whole fucking show).
Having never heard of this show until now, I’m gonna assume the subversion lies in “it was all a dream” territory?
No, nothing like that. More of a “we’re going to take all the lessons learned through the course of the show and throw them out and act like it’s all going to be okay.”
Ahh, the ol’ Executive mandated happy ending.
With a touch of British classism.
I love the bit where they went and hid in the Eden project. Mostly because they couldn’t think of anything else to do.
We could go and live in the woods but now let’s go and live in a giant greenhouse filled with tropical plants that you definitely can’t eat.
