Friday, November 02, 2012

Thirdpower had a post the other day,

"Preppers" are the crazy ones.
I'm going to ignore that dealing with looters would be a lot easier if you were armed, since NYEffingC doesn't trust the peasants with arms, and say this:
For a lot of those people, how much less sucky would this be if they had a few days of drinking water?  A few days of 'can eat it cold' food?  Some lights not dependent on the grid?  A bucket and some plastic bags for a toilet?

Nothing extravagant, or expensive, just a little bit of stuff.

Couple of years back, on a thread somewhere about disaster prep, a guy mentioned having lived in NYC, and that most apartment dwellers were screwed in the event of a real disaster: they're so used to eating out or stopping on the way home from work for groceries that they had maybe a couple of meals worth of groceries in the house that didn't require cooking; those who did, it tended to be pop-tarts or something(edible, but not exactly filling).  Which meant that if they got warning, they'd be part of the mob trying to buy the last whatever on the shelves, or sitting back and figuring the .gov would take care of them.

That works out well, doesn't it?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yep -'preppers' may be 'crazy' - but at least they can survive for more than a few days without 'essential' services or being 'rescued' by big gummint..............

Anonymous said...

Yep. The crazy people are those who think nothing bad will happen. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

How many disasters have we had in the last decade? 9/11, Katrina, tornadoes, tsunamis, the Fukishima nuclear plant failure, are just a few that come to mind without thinking about it very hard.

Anyone who hasn't prepared by now has no excuse - it is just plain willful stupidity. It is a refusal to think about bad things, because admitting that something can happen makes them uncomfortable.

Now I live well above sea level, not in hurricane country, but there have been tornadoes less than ten miles from here. I chose a neighborhood where angry mobs are infrequent, and not downwind of a chemical plant.

I still try to be prepared for mundane inconveniences like a power outage, winter storm, etc. A bit of food and water, and some firewood, will get me through a few days in relative comfort.

The folks who lost everything have my sympathy, but not the folks who didn't lose their house but are whining about how nobody is helping them. They are getting their just desserts for not being ready for ANY disruption at all, ever.

Time for them to put on their big-boy pants and get to work.