Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
If social order completely collapses for an extended duration (TEOTWAWKI), your chance of survival, prepped or not, is pretty much nil. The good news is, the likelihood of this ocurring during your lifetime is also pretty much nil.
If things partially fall apart (TSHTF), for example if you were in Los Angeles on April 29th, 1992, being prepared VASTLY improves your situation. OTOH, if you were a well-informed prepper, you would have bugged out on April 22nd (or not have been in LA in the first place).
The important thing is to not just to be ready for total collapse, but also for lesser disruption. If I have sufficient water for six months, then I have no reason to stress when West Virginia American Water shuts down my tap water for six weeks. This does mean your plans for handling crisis events will need to be more complex than "hunt down neighbors and consume their assets, lather, rinse, repeat"
TL;DR Be ready for the total collapse of society/infrastructure, and you can take lesser events in stride.
I get tired of people claiming the LA riots were some how a SHTF type scenario. It was confined to just one small ghetto area and 95%+ of the city was unaffected other than seeing poor people behaving badly on tv. I do agree that lesser disruptions ARE much more likely to happen so at least on that note we are in agreement. Yes, having the utilities stop working (for what ever reason) for a certain period of time, having your water supply compromised by industrial activity, or other such temperary events is likely to effect some of us in our life times so, yes, those seem like reasonable things to be prepared for. Note, none of those things are long term nor "the end of the world" where someone gets to live out their mad max fantasies.
It may be less interesting to discuss the dim past beginning before there was agriculture or commerce and no large groups. But I believe that a small number here may find this lecture to be interesting. It is an academic lecture in a course at Yale.
You should also not broadcast to the world what you have saved up. That's the first place people are going to go.
Indeed! I appreciate shows like Doomsday Preppers giving me ideas on how to ride out the immediate aftermath of something cataclysmic. However, I myself would NEVER tell the world what I'm doing to ready myself for such a thing!
Patriot Nurse on Youtube gives a scenario of what would happen in a SHTF scenario. She breaks it down into social layers. Which types of people would go down first, why and what you have to do about them. In the city you have to worry about those who are violent, totally amoral and have nothing to lose first; the drug addicts, felons and ex felons, those with military training, the nutjobs, etc. They'll be the first ones to come after the ones with the food, shelter and supplies. The elderly, sick, disabled, children and women would be the first targets to go down. Then you have the self entitled people addicted to their technology, cell phones, cars and the comforts of civilization. They're not paying attention and many lack survival preparedness skills so they're soft targets.
You also have to consider various scenarios; natural disaster, financial collapse, war. Which demographic group would have the highest chance of surviving.
Being a serious prepper, you have to have not only weapons and the knowledge to use, you have to know self defense without weapons. Knowledge of chemical weapons is good too. Women especially have to realize this. Medical knowledge is going to be important too.There is a German 2011 movie called Hell that gives a sort of realistic scenario of what happens in a dystopian world. Book of Eli alludes to cannibalism. Cannibalism is one thing some people will have to get used to if they want to survive, not just eating bugs. The tv series Revolution is another show I love.
You have real preppers who possess the skill and the supplies. And then you have the fundamentalist religious nutjobs who preach about the "last coming", who hoard supplies and food. They're like the Jim Jones followers. Will they go down because they're so caught up in paranoia and out of control or will they be more likely to try to take out the rest of us first? I don't know.
I think it may also make a difference in where people live.
When the worse happens in some areas, people use the disaster as an excuse to loot the stores and murder their enemies.
When cities in Iowa flooded, people from all over the area flocked in . . . to help sandbag and clean up the mess.
I think I or any of my neighbors would give you a sandwich if you asked and truly needed it. Come in here with guns blazing trying to take our food, and you'd end up dead before the end of the day.
Yep, it's about community. We aren't that many generations removed from our pioneer ancestors.
lol. "coming in here with guns blazing". A well orchestrated attack on you by a couple people with suppressed rifles (the weapon of choice for someone with a brain) and night vision and you don't stand a snowball's chance. Suppressed and night vision are already popular in the south amongst hog hunters, they would just switch roles in the apocalypse.
Even a guns blazing daytime un-suppressed attack would be a nightmare for you. Gun fights aren't pretty.
You say you would give out sandwiches now, but in the moment with hundreds of thousands of starving, you couldn't afford to feed them all. You would starve yourself trying. So you would say no.
wow, another doomer porn thread bashing folks that put aside some supplies for emergencies. How enlightning.
What it seems to boil down to in reading this thread is that anyone that has food and water and a plan to survive an emergency will instantly go down in the zombie appocolypse while the "smart"people that have no food or water or mecicine or weapons or skills will happliy make a new civliziation based on who you can get to eat for the Sunday dinner?
So, if you have a plan for an emergency,
You have planned to get out of danger areas to safer zones
If you know how to identify and harvest wild food
You can build a fire without matches
You know how to purify water
You can read a map and navigate across country
You have a safe place that you can go to
You know how to grow food
You know how to hunt and fish and trap
You know how to process animals into food and clothing
You have a basic medical knowledge and some supplies
You know how to make tools and shelters
This means you are More likely to die in an emergency than the regular sheep who don't know how to tie their shoes unless there's an app for that on their cell phone?
Sure, makes perfect sense
Just because not everyone lives in the center of a megaloplois doesn't mean that those that provide for themselves will be worse off in a disaster than those whose only survival skills are a willingness to kill other people for any or no reason.
This is just another thread promoting the total reliance and support of government to take care of us and any that don't blindly follow are to be excoriated and demeaned.
99% of disasters won't result in the doomer wet dream that several here seem to be using as the baseline for any emergency.
Go ahead and live out your fantasies.
Those of us with a modicum of intelligence will continue to take care of ourselves in spite of the government and their mindless zombie slaves.
Next time someone askes me to donate for a disaster that hits a large city, I'll just have to tell them it isn't necessary for citizens to donate, the government will provide....
This thread exemplifies that if you don't agree with the flock, you are dangerous and must be destroyed at any cost.
What a load of unadultrerated horse manure.
opening the door and "giving a sandwich" would ensure your immediate death, and the death of all who are in that room. that's naive. and if you're elderly or female you just don't open the door period.
It's a no brainer that any guns blazing at any time during 24 hours would instantly wipe out those in a compound with no weapons. I guess people in "Iowa" wouldn't make it if they open doors to give out sandwiches and have no guns themselves.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
