I can certainly see some appeal to this. I have brained stormed with others and put a great deal of thought about our current situation and how things might play out. I have read quite a few books on this topic as many of you have and as you know there are many ideas of how it could evolve. We can only guess what might happen or how it will occur but one thing seems certain it will involve civil unrest (riots, food shortages etc.) which is the reason many of us prep. My point of writing this is to try and inject some thought provoking dialog and give my reasons for the way I see it.Let me start by saying what I am talking about when I say TEOTWAWKI or SHTF and we have to bug out (or bug in) is basically war, not in the traditional sense but still a conflict against whoever is trying to take our freedom, food, shelter or whatever. You can call it what you want but bottom line is when someone is trying to kill you or take away your ability to survive or protect your family the result is the same as war.
Some survivalist or preppers might say they will bug out or they have the ability to hide and be totally isolated. While that might be so (although the longer it lasted the harder it would be) there are other things to consider. For example, do you plan on bringing all your friends and family along and feeding them. What kind of toll do you think it will be on your wife/husband if they are concerned about in-laws, kids, grand parents, grandchildren, friends etc. Being in a high stress situation is bad enough if you don't have to worry about family but you add that into the mix and it can drive you insane. I knew guys in Iraq who had issues at home to deal with and it sent them over the edge. Think of how taking the family camping and roughing it for a week can start fraying the nerves how is it going to be doing it with all the stress of survival.Without going into detail and at the risk of sounding crazy I know from experience there are worse things than death (been there) and some of you have also and will agree this may be what we are talking about here. You can talk, train, plan and prepare all you want but when the SHTF you will pray for it to be over with and be safe, if you don't believe anything else I write believe that.
Military units with extensive training and resources have difficulty getting all their members to work in harmony as a unit under stress......... is all of your group, family, kids etc that prepared and well trained ? The average family would be killing each other in a close camp or compound if they went for weeks on end without, cell phones, I pods, TV, movies, malls, McDonald's etc especially when you add the survival mode.
Another concern is your home or even your BOL. In a worse case scenario forget about going back to your house, it will be trashed and or burned, Insurance if it covered riots and civil unrest would send company's into bankruptcy. Look how they are thrown for a loop with a hurricane or flood how do you think it will be if the whole country is a disaster area. Eventually over long term anyone who lives within a gas tank range of major towns will be in the same boat.People, today is not like it was during the great depression, if things go really bad the thugs and leaches in society will kill or do what ever to try and survive. Bottom line is while it might sound macho to want to 'bring it on' I dare say unless you are a uncaring, sadistic individual you will come to curse the day it all started, things will snowball out of control, your life will never look or be the same, ALL of us will loose sons, daughters, parents, cousins or other family members who aren't prepared or strong or are careless. Go read eyewitness reports of experiences people had down through history in cases of civil wars, famines, situations where people had to fight to survive, no one writes about it with fondness and most have nightmares about it till the day they die for many of the reasons I have talked about here.
I for one pray we never have to see that day but if we do be prepared to NEVER be the same again.
TEOTWAWKI Part Two
Bravo, While some prep for that day, and want to take on the world. Others prep and still don't have a clue to what life will be like. I have been re-watching the TV series Jericho. This show can show many of us a way of life to come. Not necessarily that Nuclear bomb part, but a town trying to survive and come to grips with reality.
ReplyDeleteRob's Bunker, Some of the 'survival' type shows while maybe not very realistic in a sense do explore some of the problems which may arise. Many returning war vets will testify "not all wounds are visible"
ReplyDeleteAs you well know from our talks, I completely agree. Well done. Think I'll link this at my place.
ReplyDeleteAmen, Duke.
ReplyDeleteI am guilty of saying "bring it on on" on occasion. But usually after a weekend in Denver, where the citizens there remind me that a decent section of society has decided that they are too stupid to think of the future, but rather, what cool gadget or gizmo makes me cooler than my friends, spending their money until there is nothing left.
I'm ashamed some days for what we have become in this great country-- a nation of 10 year olds with money. "I want, I want, and I want it now" has replaced the old way of thinking "work hard and good things might happen, and only spend what we earn".
And some days it feels like the stupids are winning.
I really have a problem with the attitude of "Bring it on, let's get it over with." I won't speak for anyone but me, but I've got too much to lose.
ReplyDeleteI told someone else recently to "be careful what you wish for" it may be coming around PDQ
Duke,
ReplyDeleteLiving our life here, now, today, we are living witnesses through the historical ebbing and constant dwindling away at our liberty and freedoms, being forever lost and our lives are never to be the same.
We will be the futures living history books of the epic loss of our country.
This skidding on the downhill slide to the ends of a once great Democracy, has now picked up double-time momentum and we're headed straight for the final slope and then the dump onto new Globalist, Socialist turf.
We will not have anything similar to compare this loss to from our past.
It will be just that horrid.
I don't pretend for an instant that this nation will even resemble anything from our past memories, after the SHTF ravishes our homeland.
Preparing for Surviving through it, and coping with the post-SHTF is all I can humanly control as an individual.
The rest is all in the hands of God.
notutopia
Duke - some very sage advice and words of wisdom shared here - it's one of the reasons i check in regularly. that, plus i love your "Not Goods" series.
ReplyDeleteduring my military career, i did 2 tours of CFS Alert (Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. the farthest northern inhabited place in the world. google map it). both tours - i did six months in darkness. the living quarters are "close" to say the least. and people regularly went "batty" and had to be medi-vacced out. we all had to be FAFFE-trained in the event of fire and of course our first aid/CPR training was much more detailed than normal - we all had to be trained as First Responders for everything. at any given time there were 120 of us living in close quarters for 6 months. people came in and out on a regular basis but you get my drift.
anyway - although we had a lot of the comforts of "home" - just being so isolated taught me a lot about survivalism. our kit, all of our equipment, our stores were something that everyone was aware of at all times.
and it was nutty. and made people nutty.
i hope to never experience TEOTWAWKI in my lifetime - even though we have made major changes in our life the past few years in order to "try" to prepare for it. it will not be pretty. and it will not be easy.
and i do not wish for it - ever. something's coming - we all know that. but hopefully it isn't as bad as everyone predicts. i pray daily that whenever it comes - we find ways to pull together. and help each other. the zombies are out there, for sure. so are the thugs. but most of them are in cities. which is why i tell everyone to get out of the city as soon as possible. change your lifestyle. start preparing.
i really enjoyed this post, my friend. i would like to see more people speak this eloquently and truthfully about this topic...there are too many out there who think "bring it on". they have no idea what may come. and i pity them.
your friend,
kymber
Roger that....all of you guys. In a sense, I suppose I may never be ready enough....
ReplyDeleteStephen, thanks for the plug.
ReplyDeleteMudbug, I think we all are guilty at times wishing it would get over with but can we afford it? maybe we have no choice.
Matt, I think most of us if honest have too much to loose.
Anonymous, like you say we might not have this in our past (at least not to this extent) so all we can do is read between the lines
Kymber, as always very good points, so many times we glamorize things without realizing it. We sit and enjoy a movie about hardship and don't realize it might be the worst thing someone could go through.
Warlock, I promise you NONE of us are ready for what we may experience.
I think a lot of us, myself included, see the walls of tyranny closing in daily.
ReplyDeleteWe see that the vast majority of the public couldn't care less, and we realize that if the boys at the Bureau came and snuffed us out that the world at large wouldn't even blink
And so we think "if my options are rural Zimbabwe NOW or North Korea LATER, I'll take the former..."
Personally, I'm still short about 100 kilos of rice and 10000 rounds of 22LR so I for one hope Bernake keeps those printing presses going just a little longer...
Ausprepper, I think the best option is find a way to make people care and change it back.
ReplyDeleteWhile I know a storm is coming,no one knows when or how bad it will be. I do believe that if we don't make a change in the White House it will be sooner rather then later.
ReplyDeleteWe have been prepping and buying for a very long time and have turned an entire room in our house into a storage area.Members of my family are of the belief that it won't happen..I have tried until I am blue in the face trying to get them to come around, but still with all that is going on they just don't want to accept the fact that "something is about to happen". We even purchased silver for them last Christmas as a sort of "jump start" and that didn't work. So unfortuantly I have washed my hands of it. We now worry about my immediate family, and all my prep work is for them..because I refuse to be like the other members of my family and stand in line for a cup of soup.
JUGM, that is all you can do, at least you know you did what you could.
ReplyDelete