Preparing For The Rogue Wave Of Collapse

Spend ten minutes on the web surfing the key words “Survival Skills” and you will be presented with site after site preaching the gospel of prepping for the time that the SHTF and TEOTWAWKI. I don’t believe I need to explain those terms for you since, if you are reading this blog, you probably know what they mean. Truth is, it is a bit bittersweet for me to see so many people (myself included) planning for a major meltdown of our natural resources, our food supply, our society, and quite possibly our planet.

It is as though we are preparing for a huge rogue wave that is headed our way: a 100 foot wall of disaster that is zooming toward us. We don’t know when it is coming, but soon. And it is definitely coming.

Now wait just one second. I have written about this before but now, as well as then, I have to step aside and ask whether all of this preparation – all of this frantic planning – is creating some sort of cosmic inertia that will somehow fulfill itself. In psychology, this is called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Prepping as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Huh?

From Wikipedia:

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’.In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.

I find this fascinating for a number of reasons.

First, there is factual truth to the occurrence of extreme climate and geologic events throughout the planet. This may be a 1,000 year event, it may be global warming (jury is still out), or it may be alien intervention. Heck, I don’t know the science well enough to begin to understand why this is happening.

Second, we live in a period of economic strife. While the rich elites are flaunting their wealth, the working stiffs with jobs are hanging on for dear life not knowing whether they will be the next victim of unemployment and homelessness. Middle class? What middle class? What we used to know as the middle class has now shrunk to the point that, by my observation, no one in what was formerly called the middle class is confident enough to say “Yes, life is good here in the middle. I pay my bills with a little bit left over for beer on Friday night and I am secure knowing I will have a comfortable and fulfilling retirement.”

Third, and perhaps most telling, is that fact that so many of us are preparing for a dismal future. Even the main stream bureaucracy has become involved and gone public with the emergency preparation mantra. (See NASA Administrator Recommends Being Prepared to Employees and the CDC’s Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.) The fabric our our daily life is changing as a result. Because we expect the world situation to go from bad to worse, we are changing our attitudes, our habits, and our personal culture to adapt to a situation we think is going to occur.

And that is the crux of the matter. We are planning for something bad to happen and in the planning, we will change the course of our individual life plan. Are the facts mixed with speculation. Or are facts mixed with a fiction that becomes the new reality? See what I mean about being fascinating?
Let me be clear. I am not saying that prepping and acquiring survival skills is wrong. And most surely, I am not saying that planning for self-reliance and survival will lead to global food shortages and societal chaos. Instead, I am throwing out the possibility and probability that life as we know it is indeed changing. We are making it change, one baby step at a time, with each can of beans, with each bag rice, and with each barrel of water.

The life we are changing may be only a ripple when compared to some unknown, unpredictable catastrophe but it is a change non-the-less. And perhaps that in itself is TEOTWAWKI.

Enjoy your next adventure, wherever it takes you through common sense and thoughtful preparation!
Gaye

Mark you calendars: Have you heard of the Doctor Prepper Show? No? Doctor Prepper is James Talmage Stevens, author of Making the Best of Basics—Family Preparedness Handbook. The purpose of the radio show is to promote a preparedness lifestyle. Who can argue with that?

Yours truly will be a guest on the Doctor Prepper Show at noon, CDT on Thursday, June 23rd. The show will also be available as a podcast after the fact so watch for link late next week.

Backdoor Survival Tip of the Day: I love my hummers. You know, those tiny little birds that flock to the feeders flapping their wings a zillion times a minute and eating up a storm. (They poo a lot too but that’s another story.) Because of their voracious appetites, I keep plenty of sugar on hand so that I can make up batches of homemade bird juice. None of that premade red stuff for my hummers.
So picture this. Six 10 pound sacks of sugar in my cold damp garage for the duration of winter and a wet, rainy spring. You got it. I had six sacks of sugar-cement sitting in my garage – hardly usable. But all was not lost.

Here is the trick to soften up those bricks of sugar:

Get a large Tupperware tub, pail or bucket with a tight lid and do the best you can to force the brick of sugar inside. Once inside, open up the package then toss in five or six slices of fresh bread and seal it all up with the lid One week later? Yay! The sugar is once again granulated and back to normal.

From the Bargain Bin: This is an all points alert. When I purchased by 12” cast iron skillet about six weeks ago, the price was just under $20. Shortly after. the price jumped to about $28. Holy moly. I was looking for a 15” version today and saw the Lodge 12″ Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet at $17.95 with free shipping. Now is the time to grab it! And if I remember, later this week I will share my adventure in cooking a NY Steak in the cast iron skillet. It was soooo good and soooo easy.

Emergency Essentials is a great source of food for long term storage as well as supplies. I just received an email letting me know that they now have Mountain House products in stock. This is great news since Mountain House foods have been backordered for quite some time.

Below are some of the current monthly specials from Emergency Essentials. Doesn’t this look good? During the month of June, the price is reduced from $72.25 to $59.99.




And of course, SurvivalWoman the “water freak” recommends a water barrel.



Like this? You might also like:

• Getting Prepared Week 10: Lessons from Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD
  
• Survival Woman Reviews her new Lodge 12 inch Cast Iron Skillet
  
• Doom, gloom and the end of the world as a self-fulfilling prophecy?