Why preparedness? - Some people scoff and dismiss those who
try to be prepared "preppers" as eccentric doomsday nuts "doomsayers",
brushing off this train of thought as fanciful or paranoid. Most people think
that the 'modern world' is somehow different from the cold dark brutish days of
prehistory. Even the Great Depression of the 1920's is still within living
memory. Dismissing survivalists and what they can teach
is purely delusional based ignorance. We are still subjected to the
whims of nature, to hurricanes and earthquakes, to blizzards and droughts,
volcanoes and floods, wildfires and droughts. Between natural disasters and
man-made ones, there is little guarantee that life as we know and enjoy will
continue. As advanced as we think we are, After all, something as simple as a
rock falling from space named the Chelyabinsk
meteor has recently proven to be a threat. Access to the internet,
down filled duvet covers, GPS street navigation, sliced bread, lattes, and
iPhones won't change anything about our precarious place in the world. Nature
can change and does so very often, and in numerous ways. Visit any
ruins across the world and you will see just how much things change. Places
like Petra in Jordan or Sanchi or Palenque, Pitcairn Island, were
once vibrant cities and centers of civilization but today stand as mere ruins,
as shadows of their former glory. Even less ancient cities have changed
drastically, Oradour-sur-Glane, France, where over six-hundred people were
slaughtered by German troops as punishment for the French resistance, and today
the entire town remains abandoned. Wittenoom,
Australia, where the population of 20,000 shrank to less than a
dozen after the hazards of asbestos became well known during the 1960's and
their mines were shut down. Agdam,
Azerbaijan, where a
population of 150,000 people abandoned their homes during the Nagorno Karabakh
war. Many ruins are not places abandoned by man because nature reclaimed the
area but because of the deeds of man, a failed economy, interruption of trade
routes, wars, or simply changing technologies. This is seen in many American
ruins like Ruby
Arizona, Bodie
State Historic Park in California, Centalia Pennsylvania, Time
Beach Missouri, St. Joseph Florida, Council Alaska,
Since the development of a wider awareness
of the environment, humanity has discovered long periods of climate
change. Some periods are marked with definite and clearly distinct changes like
the KT boundary marking the end of the Cretaceous with the extinction
of the dinosaurs, and the beginning of what is called the Paleocene. Some
periods have very subtle changes. The fall of the Holy Roman Empire was not a
singular event like the assassination of a leader or an invasion. It
was a slow dereliction and evolution of both culture and economy with
constant wearing down by invading foreigners that eventually killed the Holy
Roman Empire. A wide multitude of factors may have lead to a tipping point, but
eventually Rome did fall. Today we are less likely to see such an event as
an empire falling, mostly because there have been very few true empires.
However we still witness more dramatic events ranging from volcanoes to mass
genocides to planned and strategic economic collapses of entire nations. The
fall of the Soviet Union is a perfect example of a planned economic collapse.
The entire span of the cold war has been shown, in hindsight, to have been a
sham, a planned, and deliberate plot to degrade and bankrupt the Soviet Empire
by forcing them into an arms race at an expense they could not afford and to
extort, smuggle, embezzle or otherwise steal all the wealth of the once
great and powerful Russian empire.
It wasn't until the last twenty to thirty
years that preparedness has become a side interest. For almost two hundred
years nearly all Americans, and the rest of the world long before us, were
highly self sufficient and frugal. The majority of Americans had a 'jack of all
trades' hodgepodge of skills, they could dress and butcher animals, tan their
own leather, make candles, do a little smithing, build a house, and they grew
their own food. Today all that has changed, sure more Americans may know how to
read and write, but nearly all of what they read and write is mindless
anti-intellectual prolefeed, totally worthless tabloids and garbage magazines
like "People", distributed to the masses to entertain and lull them
while keeping their interests exclusively on the impotent realm of 'pop'
culture and away from science and politics. Today very few people can build a
house while most Americans can tell you who Jennifer Aniston has
married or the bust size of Kim Kardashian. This reflects a seemingly
intentional dumbing-down of the American people. I once looked
through a news paper printed a hundred years before I was born and was amazed
to see math equations printed where the horoscopes now are.
The surprise of this fact has left its mark on my perception of
'popular culture'. Cell phones grant us instant access to the sum of
human knowledge yet fewer people know anything of real value.
Tabloids and the general 'prolefeed' fill store shelves and keep us
intellectually malnourished, while intelligent and informed
articles and television programming are increasingly giving way to reality TV
and tabloid magazines. This trend is also seen in broadcast channels such as
the History Channel, Discovery Channel, TLC, and Animal Planet, where once
purely educational and informative programming has given way to less mindful
and less intelligent reality TV style programming. We ride in air planes
guided by GPS while the fact of evolution is constantly being
challenged in public schools. We eagerly consume the products of science
without trying to understand any of it. In the last half century we've become
far more ignorant of the world and far more dependent specialists
(electricians, programmers, bakers), and on grocery stores for food imported
from across the country or even world. This alone is a major threat to our
survival. What happens to us when a 'specialist' is needed for every task of human life?
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