The idea of being a prepared kind of person these days can quickly take on the connotation or the title of what some people call being a “prepper”. It seems to me that when anyone hears this word “prepper” people instantly imagine someone owning a compound filled with 10 years worth of food & water and 1000 guns, and of course they see the individuals doing this as some camo clad fanatics that love to fear monger the population. While I must admit there are definitely some people out there that fit this description the reality is that not all people that are prepared fit this stereotype.
As a child I lived in extremely impoverished circumstances, so I became extremely aware of the idea that anything in life can change at any moment. While most people who choose to publicly describe themselves as a “prepper” may cause people to imagine or see them as an extreme person most of us are regularly people just going about our lives like everyone else. The only differences between us and everyone else is that we choose to accept and understand the reality that it is a good idea to always be prepared to some degree for whatever life throws our way.
Prepared for what you might ask… While some preppers focus on worst case scenarios and catastrophes most of us focus on realistic scenarios. These scenarios can include job loss, serious long term illness, debilitating accidents, and natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and major storms). Here is an interesting fact that our ancestors never use the word “prepper” to describe themselves because they understood that unfortunate things happened and that we should just naturally be prepared for them. What used to be a common sense action 100 years ago about being prepared is now in modern culture being viewed as an act of extremism.
As many of you have seen I keep an extensive pantry and I have a tendency to grow a very large garden. I do this because my difficult childhood taught me that regardless of the wealth of our nation that at any point I could go hungry or homeless causing me to eat out of the garbage or live under a picnic table. Once I became an adult I vowed that if I ever had children they would never know what it meant to truly be hungry. In the last several years of my life I have thoroughly taught myself how to grow my own food and how to preserve it and I did this to fulfill my vow. Along with my gardening skills I have also developed other skills such as small animal husbandry, herbalism and medicine making and foraging. It is my belief that the skills of our grandparents and great grandparents should not be lost to the winds of time. These skills were essential in the past and they are still essential to keep alive now in order to ensure self-sufficiency regardless of what happens in our societies.
Currently if you’re watching the news you’re hearing about the coronavirus and the fact that it is now considered a pandemic. I’m not here to fear monger about this, but to speak realistically to those who are willing to listen. Historically speaking our country and many countries throughout the world have gone through situations just like this and while the current generations in the US may not have witnessed this our older generations and ancestors most certainly have. During times of crisis in the past sure there was panic, but for the most part people in the past knew how to collectively hold themselves and their families together. My great grandmother Mary who was a tough Norwegian woman weathered the depression and it’s after effects that lasted for many years on a little farm in Iowa.
She was a tough woman regardless of the fact that she suffered with Crohn’s disease, which eventually killed her. During the depression she ended up marrying a man who owned a farm and needed a wife and she did this to provide shelter and food to her two daughters. This was not a marriage of love this was a marriage of necessity and by this marriage she was able to feed not only her immediate family but her extended family throughout the worst times of the depression. My great grandmother Mary had a massive garden and she raised anywhere from 300 to 400 chickens along with cows and hogs. Unfortunately the man she married wasn’t much of a farmer, so she became the farmer of that farm and planted with her two daughters the corn to feed the animals along with tending to all the livestock and growing the gardens. During this time she also picked hundreds of bushels of apples from her orchard giving some of them away to the towns people as well as to a famous boys orphanage featured in an old black & white movie called “Boys Town”.
While most of my relatives are not what I call inspiring to me in the way they’ve chosen to live their lives my great grandmother Mary on the other hand has been a massive inspiration to me. I have always remembered the stories that my grandmother told me about her and the way that they survive the depression and what they had to do to get by. As an adult I have tried to model myself after her legacy and to respect the reality that I need to be prepared for whatever may come as much as possible. Obviously there are some things that are so cataclysmic that no one can be prepared for them, but there are many others that we can and that is what I focus on. Our ancestors believed that this way of thinking was just the way we did things and that it was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. Unfortunately for modern generations we have lost touch with the wisdom of our ancestors and because of this we have lost generations of valuable knowledge. Over the last 20 years it is this knowledge and wisdom that I have endeavored to gain back into myself and into my family.
To anyone out there reading this, being prepared is not a crazy concept it’s an act that is responsible, because it’s about being accountable for yourself and your family and what happens to them. Like I said if you’ve been watching the news you know what the CDC has said about everything going on. To them it’s not a matter of if but when and that’s why they advised people to understand that they need to have at least two extra weeks of food and supplies. In all reality it needs to be at least a month or two minimum if you want to be truly realistic about things. Some people may wonder how bad will the situation get and in all reality I can safely say that none of us really knows absolutely. Either way I hope everyone out there takes what I’m saying seriously and does what they can to whether this situation or any other that they may be facing in life.
The one thing I do know is that burying our heads in the sand and pretending like bad things don’t happen or that we can just simply wish them away with enough positive thought could put yourself and your family in a potentially dangerous situations. Life after all is frocked with many challenging problems that require realistic solutions and becoming numb or blind to them is not going to solve them. The stories of my great grandmother Mary taught me that I should pay attention to the world around me and that I should be realistically prepared as much as possible for what life may send my way. You may be asking this question about me… Do you anxiously hyper-focus on possible world changing scenarios all the time? No, not really at all, because I have chosen to look at being prepared in the same way that my ancestors did and so it is just a natural part of mine and my families existence. Just in case you’re wondering the purpose of me writing about this subject today is to have everyone think about being prepared in a realistic way for any of life’s challenges.
Until next time…
Namaste!
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