I never made it to Eagle Scout, but I was, for a time, an active member of a Boy Scout troop. I still have my copy of the Boy Scout Handbook For Boys on a bookshelf in my dining room. Click that link for a picture of exactly what my copy looks like. The price is listed as sixty-five cents on the cover of the book I have.
"Be Prepared" is the Boy Scout motto, and maybe it's true that "once a Scout, always a Scout." My blog postings talking about global warming and solar storms (not to mention earthquakes off the coast in the Pacific Northwest), made me think about that motto. What should we - what should I - be doing, right now, to "Be Prepared," and to put that motto into practice?
Maybe, I thought, I should look into becoming a "Prepper." That would be taking that "Be Prepared" motto seriously, wouldn't it? I had heard the term, but I had only a very general idea of what it would take to be a "Prepper," so I looked up that term, online, and found that Wikipedia categorizes "Preppers" as the same thing as "Survivalists," and also uses the term, "Doomsday Preppers."
There is no bright line dividing general emergency preparedness from prepping in the form of survivalism (these concepts are a spectrum), but a qualitative distinction is often recognized whereby preppers/survivalists prepare especially extensively because they have higher estimations of the risk of catastrophes happening. Nonetheless, prepping can be as limited as preparing for a personal emergency (such as a job loss, storm damage to one's home, or getting lost in wooded terrain), or it can be as extensive as a personal identity or collective identity with a devoted lifestyle.
Survivalism emphasises self-reliance, stockpiling supplies, and gaining survival knowledge and skills. The stockpiling of supplies is itself a wide spectrum, from survival kits (ready bags, bug-out bags) to entire bunkers in extreme cases.
Survivalists often acquire first aid and emergency medical/paramedic/field medicine training, self-defense training (martial arts, ad hoc weaponry, firearm safety), and improvisation/self-sufficiency training, and they often build structures (survival retreats, underground shelters, etc.) or modify/fortify existing structures etc. that may help them survive a catastrophic failure of society.
Use of the term survivalist dates from the early 1980s.
The Hill, an online source of news on topics mostly political, also provided some guidance. The following suggestions came from an article in The Hill titled, "What the average family can learn from doomsday preppers."
Many countries in the world (including the U.S. and Finland), already advise people to prepare to survive for three days without help from authorities. For those who want to make a modest investment in preparedness, here are our top tips for the everyday family prepper:
A “basics” kit kept somewhere accessible. It should include a couple of flashlights and spare batteries, a wind-up radio (governments still plan to broadcast on radio in an emergency), hand sanitizer, a pack of face masks, a charged battery pack for devices, foil blankets for emergency warmth, baby wipes in case the shower is out of action, a basic first aid kit that hasn’t been raided and a supply of any essential medication. And don’t forget your pets!
You certainly don’t need an underground store, but having a few days’ supply of nutritious food items that don’t require cooking (baked beans, soups, cereal, etc.,) would likely be helpful in the event of a major crisis. Some ultra-high temperature (UHT) and powdered milk would come in handy and some spare powdered baby milk too if you need that. I’d definitely add spare toilet paper to the list (for some reason this is what sold out first in pandemic panic buying.)
Bottled water and a water filter. You can survive on not a huge amount of food for quite a while, but a lack of drinkable water becomes a problem pretty quickly. We keep a few large bottles of water tucked away, but also have a camping water filter that is effective in making safe pretty much any natural water source if we ever need it.
We would never advise keeping dangerous stores of car fuel lying around in gas cans, but if you can keep your vehicle topped up with fuel or electricity rather than filling up from empty, you won’t run into immediate difficulties if the supply is suddenly interrupted for any reason. You can also use your car battery to tune into emergency radio channels — and to charge your cell phone. We keep a road atlas, a couple of blankets, long-life snacks and some bottled water in the car in case we ever get stuck on the move.
Keep some cash tucked away in a place you will be able to find it in case of emergency. In a disaster, credit cards might not work.
You don’t have to obsess about every eventuality; that way madness lies. But having a few of the above things in place is peace of mind that the family will have the basics in most circumstances.
I am pretty much thinking that planning ahead for problems makes a lot of sense. After all, our presidential election now being over, and with the Trump Administration now flexing its power, I keep remembering that the candidate who won has promised to become a dictator, and to use military force against those whom he decides are not going along with his program.
Plus, I can't help remembering the devastating fires in Los Angeles, in early January. We do have those potential earthquakes, wildfires, and solar storms, plus the ongoing disaster of global warming, which has a lot to do with the wildfires I just referenced.
Do we want to get prepared to survive and sustain in a world of non-hypothetical real disasters, and lots of potential disasters, all of them very much meriting that "terrifying" label?
Emergency kits, and similar preparations will be welcome, undoubtedly, but other people are going to be the key. Let me say it one more time.
What do we need to do to prepare for the future - for future troubles, and for the future opportunities we will, undoubtedly, also encounter?
We need to take some advice from Octavia Butler. Find some friends!
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