There is nothing wrong with being prepared. I cannot imagine a scenario that could occur where I would regret preparedness. To be prepared is the most reasonable stance one can have. It is literally the motto of the Boy Scouts. Do you have a spare tire and a jack? Then you are prepared to change a flat. Get a AAA membership and you are prepared for a variety of road emergencies. How about some candles or an oil lamp? Now you are prepared to have some light in a power outage. The very idea of preparation in advance of adversity is as suitable a concept as any I can think of. If all of this is true, then why am I about to drop paragraphs against prepping for doomsday? Because it is most often done at the expense of more necessary actions. It is prioritizing one’s preparation that needs examination.
When you hear the word “prepper” you may immediately think of some guy stockpiling food and supplies in his bunker under an off-grid cabin in the mountains. You may have seen some of these sorts highlighted on some cable TV show doing exactly that. I am aware of those shows, but without a television or the inclination to watch, I’ve never seen one. But I get the idea and know or have met several – no, many – people who consider themselves preppers. The thing is, every prepper I’ve met has his priorities out of whack. They’re all preparing for a worst case scenario while failing to prepare for obvious and likely occurrences.
I did some prepping myself. In the face of the Y2K scare I laid up significant amounts of food and water, along with a variety of goods that I felt might be hard to get if we did have a catastrophe. You may laugh if you like, and many did when the calendar turned to the year 2000 with no significant trouble, but for a time serious people were very concerned about what would happen. To me, and some others I knew, it seemed prudent to hedge our bets and stock up on supplies and food. And over the counter medicines. And ammo. Okay, I admit it. For a time back then I got caught up in the moment and started to think the end was nigh.
Two things happened. First, clever programers found a solution to the computer date code issues. And second, I didn’t need to buy much food for most of the year 2000. In fact, buying all that canned food and bagged rice was cheaper because it was in bulk and purchased when on sale. Oh well. I am surely glad that I was prepared, but more glad that nothing bad happened. And since preparation for it resulted in nothing more terrible than having plenty of food that would last a long time (food that I could and did eat,) I consider the preparation worthwhile. Especially with the memory from the previous winter where, while living near Chicago, we experienced one of the largest snowfalls on record. The massive blizzard shut down the roads and highways for several days, and by the time I got to the supermarket the shelves were empty. Literally empty. I took pictures to work to show people, but they all had their own pictures from their supermarkets.
1999 supermarkets (and today’s) were much different from how they were in 1969. In those thirty years “just-in-time” delivery replaced grocery warehousing on site. As a child if a product was not on the shelf a clerk might check in the back. As an adult I found that if it wasn’t on the shelf it was most likely on a truck on its way. If the trucks can’t get there, the shelves become empty. After Y2K I have never worried about running out of food during a winter storm again. Evermore I would be prepared.
But that experience ran me right up against the world of prepping.
I’ll first clarify that when I say prepper, I am making a distinction from someone who makes preparations for rare but predictable scenarios. Preppers are not laying up some food and stores against a tough winter. Preppers are hoarding ammo and dehydrated foods for when the zombies attack. Preppers are reading books on bushcraft and how to run trout lines for post-apocalyptic survival. Preppers are spending hours in online forums discussing barter economy and what will be used for money after hyperinflation destroys all fiat currency.
What happens when you take a dive into that world is you discover the near universal belief that doomsday lies ahead. Maybe just ahead. In no time you are repeating the mantra that doomsday isn’t an if, but a when. And the when is wide open. Doomsday’s arrival is like the explosion of the Yellowstone caldera or an asteroid strike. It could be a thousand years from now or it could be before I finish this sentence. At that point you start to think that if it could happen any second you need to go deep and start prepping post haste. Better to get some of the prepping done right away.
But what, exactly, are we preparing for? Will it be civil war? Regular war? Nuclear war? A pandemic? The dreaded zombie apocalypse? The possibilities seem endless. At each step of prepping you find many more things to prep for. Once you start to plan for hunkering down at home you learn that you might not be at home when it starts. So you need prep gear for getting home. Then when you get home you might need to flee to another location, so you need a “bug out bag.” It’s for when you have to flee to the hills. And then you need to stockpile wherever it is you think you’re going to bug out to. After going to a prepper convention I decided that the hills are going to get mighty crowded.
What I realized is that we can’t really know what doomsday will look like and what we will need when it comes, or rather if it comes. The “if” part is much harder to comprehend once you’ve walked in prepper boots, but it is the more reasonable conjunction. What experience do any of us have with doomsday? Apart from personal life tragedy that could claim that moniker, there aren’t many doomsdays to use as examples. Hurricanes have hit, volcanos have erupted, and invasions have happened; and in each of those events and some several others great tribulations were visited on the masses in certain areas. I’m sure the denizens of Pompeii would be just in stating autumn of 79 AD is when doomsday hit. And we’ve all seen film footage of streams of refugees pushing carts and carrying babies as they flee the ravages of war, both past and current. But Vesuvius was quiet for hundreds of years before the eruption of 79, and how do people know if they are going to be welcoming refugees, or if they themselves will be the refugees seeking welcome? And for all the destruction that earthquakes and hurricanes visit on people, we’ve always started picking up the pieces shortly after it was over and got back to our lives more or less as they were. None of them ever turned into doomsday. Some preparations for the sort of weather emergency likely where you live should suffice without hoarding two years supply of toilet paper and organizing a private militia.
But the chances that any of the doomsday scenarios will happen within the normal lifespan of an adult in urban or suburban America are very low. So prepping for them is not a good use of time and money unless those preparations coincidentally cover other, more likely needs, such as power outages and winter storms.
The real problem is that much of the time and money preppers spend working out solutions to unlikely doomsday scenarios is time and money that could have been spent preparing for likely future needs.
Most preppers that I’ve met are unprepared for a loss of a job. They have mortgages or pay rent, they carry credit card debt and a loan on their car. Most would need to replace the lost job with one at least as good within a few weeks time. They’re prepping for bugging out to the hills when they aren’t prepared for a recession. And we have historical recessions and depressions as examples. We know they happen. Doomsdays are theoretical.
Most of those preppers I’ve known are not prepared to send their children to college. Yet we know that children often wish to go to college and that it is often advantageous for them to do so.
Preppers I’ve met expect to confront doomsday by barricading themselves in their compound and returning to a lifestyle reminiscent of how they believe it was in the olden days. But in truth most of them are permanently tied to the modern world through medicine. The sad truth is we live in a country at a time when the obesity rate nears 50% and chronic health problems abound. And many people, all too often including the preppers, are going to spend the rest of their lives dependent on prescription drug refills and follow up appointments. If it isn’t diabetes it is hypertension. Or they’re on blood thinners, or other drugs to help their heart conditions. Not all but many preppers, certainly most that I’ve met, have chronic conditions that require medical attention and drugs, or will soon enough because of their poor health. They make their appointments with their doctors, they arrange for prescription refills by mail, and then they go back to prepping as if all of what they just did will somehow no longer matter after the apocalypse. They are not prepared to function without modern medication and expertise while they prepare for a world that will have none. If there is a single thing I would point at to illustrate the cognitive dissonance in most preppers it would be this.
People get sick, and divorced, and adopt puppies. Companies relocate and towns flourish and decline. Technology makes obsolete the previous new technology. Some amount of preparation is a good idea. Especially when preparing for things that we know happen. But prepping for things we fear but have never seen is imprudent.
As I write the world is in the grips of a pandemic. COVID-19, a novel coronavirus, is leaping in numbers around the globe. The virus, which appears to have come from bats and jumped to humans through some other transitory animals at a market in Wuhan, China, has reached the US. The numbers are growing in terms of cases and deaths, and our CDC (Center for Disease Control) is not optimistic about its spread. There are aspects to this virus and how easy it is to pass that it alarms even the most staid viral pathologists. This could be terrible.
One of the answers in combatting this virus is quarantine. Isolating those who have the disease, and those who have come in contact with those who do can be effective in slowing the spread. The slower spread will help the hospitals address the cases they see. As the virus spreads the risks rise for those who continue to mingle in crowds. We have official travel restrictions in place and stay at home orders. Companies are laying people off or insisting on working from home if optional. It is becoming more apparent that staying home presents less risk than standing in a queue at the supermarket wondering if the last person at the register had washed their hands.
Suddenly people aren’t laughing at preppers. Preppers, after all, can self-quarantine more easily.
But let me be clear: I never laughed at preppers. I have been concerned about them for reasons that I mentioned above, but laughing isn’t nice. Or helpful.
A century or so ago, and for most of time prior to that, the trip to the store was a planned event. People hitched their wagons and piled the kids aboard for a trip into town they might make once or twice a month. They would load their wagon with a variety of goods to last them until the next trip, and visit all the other services they needed while there. Blacksmiths, pharmacists, barbers, the post office, etc. When you were at home and time came to prepare dinner, if you ran out of something, you would not dash to the corner store or hop in the car. You would just do without.
I worked in ships at sea for many years of my life. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean is a poor time to find out you are out of something. Like sailors over the years, and farmers of old, what you have is what you eat.
If you keep some of those habits and buy more things less often. And if you focus on keeping enough on hand that you will need to make fewer trips to the store, you will be able to more easily stay home and weather the storm, meteorological or epidemiological.
Stocking up on groceries is not the same as hoarding. And being prepared is not the same as Prepping.
Sure, as we watch to see how this pandemic affects us it is easy to wonder if preppers are the smart ones. I say the answer is no. In their efforts to prepare for the end of the world as we know it, they have inadvertently prepared for one aspect of a really bad virus. But the simple task of stocking your larder and cooking more of your own meals would take care of that too. And it would leave you more time and money to prepare for how you will pay for your daughter’s college now that she wants to go to medical school and become Surgeon General.