SO YOU WANT TO BE A PREPPER

As you wander through the great miasma of life you suddenly feel a compulsion to prepare yourself for hard times, or disaster. How this realization, or epiphany, came upon you is a matter of discussion. No one set of circumstances fits all. It is just a matter of your mental alarm clock going off and waking you up. It is just a matter of a ray of light coming through the clouds of mental debris that covers our globe. And if your moment arrives, I say welcome. You have a lot of ground to cover and no one can give you an exact time frame as to when you have to have completed your mission. How's that for an exact science!

But prepare in earnest, because things don't look too good right now. There are so many catastrophies hanging over our heads at the moment that it boggles the mind to even try to explain them all. You just pick up on an item here and an item there and all of a sudden you realize that we are in deep shit and our shovel ain't too big.

I was reading a website this morning that made the statement that when the mainstream starts prepping no one will be able to afford to prep anymore. And I thought about what it would be like if a couple hundred million people were all trying to buy rice and beans in this country in preparation for hard times. Would rice go to $3 a pound? Probably. Would beans go to $7 a pound? Probably. If I was wealthy I would go out and buy 10 tons of rice and 10 tons of beans. Wouldn't that raise a stink! I can see the headlines now: MAN IN MIDDLE AMERICA BUYS HUGE AMOUNT OF FOOD COMMODITIES. The whole nation would gaze in wonderment. And start to worry. Does the crazy SOB know something we don't know? What it going on? Well, I don't have the money and I ain't gonna do such a thing, so don't worry about it. Besides, it might make things tough for my friends out in the countryside trying to get ready. And most of them have it tough enough as it is.

So I want to make your education a little quicker so that you might not suffer from lack of time. Anything to help a prepper.

First thing to handle is security. This usually entails guns and ammo and maybe a relocation of your living quarters. Anything worth having is worth protecting. If it ain't worth protecting then throw it away! Protect yourself and your loved ones and friends with shotguns and rifles. Have a good supply of ammo. A thousand rounds per gun ain't a bad start. And ammo is expensive right now. Just bear the cost and go on. If you ain't got enough money then save it or earn it or sell something that will make it for you. IF IT IS WORTH HAVING IT IS WORTH PROTECTING. Start your prepping from a position of strength, not the level of a begger. If you don't have square one occupied what the hell is the sense of going to square two? And there are a hundred different ideas of what kind of armaments to have so I go along with Ayoob and say to get what you can use. It doesn't matter if you shoot a 22LR or a Barrett .50 caliber. If you have it and you can hit with it then you have come a long way down the road. I generally urge folks to get 22LR, 12 gauge pump shot guns, and some kind of longer range, bigger caliber, heavier rifle for deer and whatever. Whatever is what tries to take your food and rape your wife and burn you out.

After you have this little situation solved then you can get on to building up your supply of food and water. It's mighty tough to make it without food and water. Some of us fat asses can go quite a while without food but water seems to be the common thing we all have to have. If you have a good well or a good spring on your land then you are okay, as long as your well has a handpump and not an electric pump. Things that work off of electricity can be shut off and you will not be able to turn it back on until the powers that be decide to do it. How's that for personal independence? Maybe the public utility guys will turn it back on if they get tens times the amount of monery they are charging you now. Does that seem preposterous? Looked at the price at the gas pump lately?

Your food is where you can get it. As ChinaMart takes over more and more of the nations business, it would seem that you will get the most for your dollar at these fine establishments. Buy lots of food and big containers to hold it all. Beans and rice are not talked ahout just to be flippant. Served together they just happen to be very nutritious. They will keep you alive. I eat them all the time. My system is used to them. We just had a two day convention and it took me FOUR days to get my system back in order after it was over. Processed food just don't get it. My wife is a forager and I eat straight from Nature's bounty. It doesn't get any better than that. She is down visiting the Amish right now, buying milk and eggs and butter and whatever. It sure would be nice to duplicate their off-grid living. I sure don't want to fool with their closed gene pool, however. Too many problems are gonna come from that. Just another case of religion trumping good sense. I ain't got much for religions.

After you get your security and your food and water under control, then you can get to tools. Have you got anything that will run without oil-based fuel to cut your wood so you can cook and purify your water? You can make or buy all the firestarters you want but if you have no fuel it ain't gonna do much for you. Get an axe and some Bow Saws stored away. Some good files wouldn't hurt either. Dull axes and saws are mighty wearing. Shovels and rakes and push plows won't hurt you any either, at least not in the area of capability. Splitting mauls are nice. Extra stuff to do repairs around the homestead won't hurt to have either.

Growing food is a big advantage over the stores. You don't have to take cash when you go to your garden. And if you plant non-hybrid seed you won't have to have cash the next year either. What you do is Google Saving Garden Seed. I just ran the search myself and it brought up all kinds of stuff. And it is good to have the ability to save seed. Not having that ability leaves you a slave to a seed company like Monsanto who likes to splice in their Terminator gene to keep you hooked. But having your own seed and keeping it from year to year is a soul satisfying deed. Don't be deprived of it. Keep your independance as best you can. Part of being a survivalist is keeping your independance, your personal freedom, intact as best you see fit to accomplish. Yeah, it will cost you time and some extra labor, but it is damn well worth it.

And what about your clothing and creature comforts? Bought any good wool blankets for next Winter? Could get mighty cold if the power is out and the power might well be out. Heat with oil? Lord have mercy. I can't even imagine such a thing. Get warm sleeping gear and warm, tough clothes for the cold weather. Got extra boots? Better get 'em before the Chinese start buying all the catttle hides and taking them to Asia. Got extra belts and gloves and hats? Better get 'em! The cost of getting them now might be high, but later on it could be prohibitive, if not impossible.

Got a place out of towns and cities where you can hole up in times of trouble? Not a bad idea to have such a place. Go in with some people you trust and buy a piece of dirt if nothing else. Go squat on a friends farm. He can probably use the extra help anyhow. And it could teach you something about the production of food and the health of your family. Hamburgers are not magically formed in a back room at McDonalds. You can learn to grow and harvest your own meat. I have done a lot of it. All the way from killing the critter to cooking it, and all the steps in between. I have stayed up many nights as a young man roasting a whole hog on a spit and turning it occasionally so it doesn't burn. Good training for survivalists. And training counts. Your brain is the best survial tool you have and the more it can learn the better off you are.

In the days ahead the person you can trust the most is another prepper. And his skills can become your skills too. But the non-prepping society is not to be trusted at all. And especially your government. I laugh at those who say they don't want any money from the government. I paid money to those self-serving clowns all my working life and I will take every bit of it back that I can get my grubby hands on. Stimulous checks, Social Security checks, any kind of check. I'll be very happy to accept their money, as long as it spends. If it won't spend, don't bother me with it. And don't make taking a check an agreement that I will serve or obligate myself to the government. Ain't gonna happen. See what an independant attitude you get when you are prepared for hard times? You start being able to look around and make decisions and judgements about things with the good sense God gave you instead of via some goddamn propaganda fed to you buy the tracherous media. A survivalist will give you better info than the media. Any day of the week.

There are many things to get prepared with. As many things as you can imagine or someone else can imagine. I could spend a million dollars so easy it's ridiculous. But I don't have to spend that much, at least not now. But I can get ready. And that is important. And remember, prepping is NOT self indulgence. It is survival.

Stay alive!

Michael

mboone@rtccom.net