REAL AMERICA
THE WORLD'S STUPIDEST SURVIVAL STRATEGY
Exclusive: Patrice Lewis notes not every emergency calls for 'a Rambo response'
Since I’m “into” prepping, I’ve been following the columns of WND’s Pat McLene (“The Practical Prepper“) with great interest – including the comments posted in response, which are sometimes the most interesting part.
Prepping, by way of a fast definition, is the state of being ready to cope with unpredictable events or situations. Preparedness is acquiring the knowledge, skills, supplies and strategies necessary to mitigate the negative consequences of an emergency.
Those emergencies can be personal (illness or job loss), regional (national disaster, terrorist attack), or national/international (solar flare/EMP attack, economic crash). It’s important to point out that being prepared doesn’t prevent bad things from affecting you. It means you hope to be less affected by those bad things.
By definition, “prepping” means preparing done in advance of hard times, not after. This little subtlety – that preparing is best done before rather than after a serious event – seems to escape a lot of people.
Recently, I read a comment that is among the world’s stupidest survival strategies: “The Number 1 prepping item you cannot be without is a GUN. With it, you can get everything else. Without it, someone can take everything else from you including your life.”
I will give this poster the benefit of the doubt and assume a gun is not his only survival item. But let’s take a few moments to examine why I disagree with this comment.
Firearms are a critical part of what I call the “seven core areas” of preparedness: Food, water, shelter, lighting, medical, sanitation and protection. Guns (which fall in the “protection” category) are tools that can serve a variety of purposes, including putting meat on the table and protecting against marauders.
I’m a big believer that people should become their own “first responders” in a crisis, able to hunker down or bug out as necessary, depending on the nature of the emergency. However there are a lot of people who think preparedness is unnecessary because nothing bad could ever affect them. They spend their money on big-screen TVs, personal electronics and fashionable clothing instead of beans, bullets and Band-Aids.
This “won’t prepare” category includes a breed of über-macho armchair warriors whom McLene scoffingly refers to as the “rocking-chair Rambos” – the ones who think they don’t have to be prepared, because they have … drum roll, please … a gun. And with that gun, ladies and gentlemen, they can “get everything else” they need to survive a crisis.
The implication of this statement – “With [a gun], you can get everything else” – is foolish, threatening, impractical … and ultimately suicidal. This is because it suggests the gun owner intends to fill in whatever prep-related deficiencies he has by force.
In other words, at best his plan is to intimidate and threaten those who have supplies he wants; at worst, he plans to murder people – all because he was too lazy/stubborn/arrogant to put aside some beans and rice. Ooooh, congratulations! What a great survival strategy!
Fueled by Mad Max and zombie apocalypse fantasies, these rocking-chair Rambos are forgetting a couple of very critical things.
First, not every emergency situation is an “end of the world as we know it” scenario. In fact, most aren’t. Last November, our region was devastated by a massive windstorm that knocked out power anywhere from a few hours to 10 days (for us, it was four days). Since our immediate neighborhood was prepared, everyone had food, water, heat, lights and other necessities. No one required any outside assistance from emergency services, leaving first responders available to help those truly in need.
In other words, the world didn’t end – but we were sure glad to have our preps since they made us comfortable during the outage. An armchair-warrior mindset (“Let me have your kerosene lamp or I’ll blow you away!”) would have been entirely unnecessary and frankly stupid under these conditions. In other words, not every emergency will qualify as a “Rambo” response.
Second, if it truly was a “bleep hit the fan” situation, then most preppers – presumably the ones Mr. Rocking-Chair Rambo wants to liberate of the supplies he covets for himself – are also armed … and these preppers are far more motivated to protect what’s theirs from marauding basement warriors who think they can take whatever they want.
Apparently, the only scenarios these armchair Rambos are considering is an end-of-the-world situation during which they will suddenly be plunged into what’s euphemistically called WWROL (World Without Rule of Law). Without law, they are free to take what they want by force. Since that’s the case, why bother prepping anything else? They’ve got a gun! They can get everything else!
Because of this testosterone-fueled mindset, these warriors never bother with setting up the three-legged stool of preparedness (supplies, skills/knowledge, community). They don’t bother stocking up on supplies because they think they’ll be able to take what they want by force; they don’t bother acquiring the skills and knowledge for living a comfortable life without modern conveniences because they’ll, uh, force others to provide them; and they certainly never bother cultivating the community ties that can help them if they’re in trouble (because they never leave their mama’s basement?).
This Rambo fantasy is fairly popular among a certain caliber of men (rarely women), but this kind of hyper-machismo is asking for trouble. I seem to remember someone very important saying those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Just sayin’.
I realize I’m taking this example of the rocking-chair Rambos to extremes, but it’s to illustrate a point: A gun (or two or three) is a useful tool, but it’s just a tool. If you try to wield that tool against someone with a stronger tool, then you’ve lost and have nothing to fall back on. Firearms are an important part of a prepared lifestyle, but NOT as a means to force others to turn over their “everything else” to you.
So here’s a better idea: Buy a gun, yes; but also stock up on those other core areas (food, water, shelter, lighting, sanitation, medical) so you don’t have to pretend to be a basement warrior whenever a windstorm/blizzard/hurricane/whatever knocks out utilities for a week or two. Be prepared to help yourself as well as to help your neighbor. Be ready to be your own first responder if an emergency hits. In other words, think self-sufficiency, not paramilitary.
And stop thinking you’re Rambo. Rambo is a teenage-boy fantasy, a Hollywood fiction. Using a gun to steal from others in times of trouble doesn’t make you macho; it just makes you look dumb … and will likely make you dead.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/09/the-worlds-stupidest-survival-strategy/#7q0i30WFvxcbvtqX.99
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