Reese - Preppers Long-Term Survival Guide

A s we look at time from this side of 2020, it seems that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was a dividing line between past and present. On the other side of the line, things were fairly good, with occasional problems that we all dealt with. But once we crossed into 2020, problems became nonstop. These weren't just any problems either; they were disasters, which followed one after another. It seemed like each month had its own disaster, to the point where people were making jokes about "disaster pools" and asking who had guessed the right disaster for that month.

The trend continued through 2020, 2021 and into 2022. At this point, nobody really knows how long it is going to continue. This could be the "new normal," totally replacing the normal that we all knew and loved. Granted, that normal had problems too; but not to the scale that this new normal does.

Actually, this is not the first time in recent history when we have been faced with years that seemed to be filled with disasters. The year of Hurricane Katrina, 2005, was one such year. People were talking about the world ending at that time; but the world managed to keep spinning on. Likewise, there have been years where we were facing potential disasters that seemed as bad. Does anyone remember Y2K? Yet that wasn't even a fizzle, let alone a bang.

It is evident that plenty of disasters have occurred over the years. Sometimes they strike singly and in other years it seems that they come all together in a bunch. 2020 and the years to follow, have definitely been years which were filled with many problems.

When the COVID-19 pandemic was first announced, it didn't seem like a big deal. That was something happening on the other side of the world and probably wouldn't affect us. But that attitude didn't last long, when the first COVID-19 patient died in the United States, a mere 10 days after we first heard about it and the various state governments started declaring lockdowns three months later. About the same time, supermarkets started emptying out; first of hand sanitizer, then toilet paper and then just about everything else. We went from full grocery stores to empty ones in one week, and the supply problems still haven't gotten back to normal, over two years later.

Yet there were people in our society who weren't in as bad a shape as the rest of the population. These people had stockpiles of toilet paper and other supplies in their homes; not because they beat everyone else to the grocery store, but because they lived that way. These "preppers" believed in being prepared for any disaster, stockpiling supplies, buying survival gear and learning the necessary skills to survive in any given disaster.

Although the prepping movement is relatively new, the concept of prepping is not. If we go back in history, we find that throughout the majority of history, our ancestors have been forced to prepare. If nothing else, they would be faced by a disaster called "winter" every year. During that time, they would be unable to hunt, trap, forage or grow food. If they didn't have enough food stocked up, before the first snows of winter came, their chances of survival through the winter were very slim.

It is only in modern times, when we have built a massive infrastructure and incredibly complex supply chain that people have forgotten about the need to prepare for winter and other disasters. We have become less and less self-sufficient, while we have become more and more dependent on that supply chain and infrastructure. As long as everything keeps working, we're fine. But as we've seen in 2020 and 2021, it doesn't take much to make the whole house of cards fall down.

Of the entire infrastructure, the electric grid is the most fragile part. Yet we need electricity for just about everything we do. it's safe to say that one cannot live long, in modern society, without it. People lived without it in the past and there are still parts of the world where people live without it today; but they know how to live without it. In our society, however, we have either little or no idea whatsoever of how to live without electricity and we don't have the tools to do many common, necessary tasks, without using electricity to power our tools.

But electricity isn't the whole problem. We also need our infrastructure to provide us with water and to carry waste water away from our homes. We need natural gas for cooking and heating. We need countless things that society brings us, from communications to people to protect us from the two-legged predators living in this world.