Maybe the preppers are going about it all wrong. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
Because the best protection isn’t a 30-room bunker; it’s having 30 people who care about you.
This week’s focus is on self-reliance, a more complex topic than it may seem. Today’s essay was first posted here on Of Two Minds on June 27, 2008, and it has elicited quite a bit of commentary over the years. I’ve edited it slightly for today’s post.
I’m not trying to be difficult, but I can’t help cutting against the grain on topics like surviving the coming bad times when my experience runs counter to the standard received wisdom.
A common thread within most discussions of surviving bad times–especially really bad times–runs more or less like this: stockpile a bunch of canned/dried food and other valuable accoutrements of civilized life (generators, tools, canned goods, firearms, etc.) in a remote area far from urban centers, and then wait out the bad times, all the while protecting your stash with an array of technology (night vision binocs, etc.)
Now while I respect and admire the goal, I must respectfully disagree with just about every assumption behind this strategy. Once again, this isn’t because I enjoy being ornery but because everything in this strategy runs counter to my own experience in rural settings.
You see, when I was a young teen my family lived in the mountains. To the urban sophisticates who came up as tourists, we were “hicks” (or worse), and to us they were “flatlanders” (derisive snort).
Now the first thing you have to realize is that we know the flatlanders, but they don’t know us. They come up to their cabin, and since we live here year round, we soon recognize their vehicles and know about how often they come up, what they look like, if they own a boat, how many in their family, and just about everything else which can be learned by simple observation.
