Why People Think Preppers Are Crazy...
Kinda' funny the image preppers have in popular culture these days. Wild-eyed nuts, clutching weapons, muttering about martial law, waiting... perhaps longing... for some post-apocalyptic nightmare world...
How did being prepared become crazy? Heck, it's the Boy Scout motto! People have spare tires and jumper cables in their cars. Fire extinguishers in their houses. They spend billions on insurance. Clearly preparedness is considered sane. So maybe it's what people think we're preparing for.
Ah yes. Apparently there was a popular cable TV show that was (supposedly) about DOOMSDAY PREPPERS. Fair enough. Back on the LATOC Forum, we commonly referred to ourselves as "Doomers".
But is the doom of the Cornucopian Era really perceived as a crazy notion? Polls often show the majority of the public is stressed or doubtful of the future. One can sit down and rationally evaluate the Big Picture, where the momentum of culture, politics, economic structure, resource depletion, infrastructure decay, demographics, ecology, and technology are hurtling towards a combined tipping point beyond which the norms of modern civilization cannot long endure. The fundamental nature of the Federal Reserve and fractional banking alone are a 100% guarantee of a catastrophic failure of the global economy unless something else derails civilization first.
On some level, I think most people know the status quo is doomed.
So, oddly enough, it isn't the prepping or even the doom that seems crazy in Doomsday Preppers... It's the DAY part!
The SHTF syndrome... An apparent belief that one day will be Business As Usual, the next day something will happen, and every day after that will be a bloody, life-or-death battle against Mutant Zombie Bikers in the smoldering ruins of what used to be Civilization!
I suppose the standard was set back in the 'good old days' of the Cold War. Yeah, we had just plain Global Thermonuclear War as our boogeyman. Even after Americans realized that Mutual Assured Destruction was in-place, and the Godless Commies didn't particularly like the idea of turning the Earth into a radioactive wasteland either, we could still worry about a flock of birds confusing a radar monitor or some-such unleashing the vast stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
Then the Soviet Union stopped being a thing and we had to find other potential near-extinction level SHTF events...
Y2k, the coding problem that was supposed to cause computers to go nuts, was our favorite trigger fror TEOTWAWKI for a little while there. But, by '98 that was mostly fodder for jokes, and we had to turn to cosmic events for our potential SHTF. (Seriously. Two Hollywood blockbuster Meteor Smashes The Earth movies came out that year.)
Then it was Global Warming out to kill us all. But the port cities are still above water, Santa's neighborhood didn't melt away, polar bear populations are on the upswing, and Katrina-level hurricanes didn't become a regular thing.
Then the whole Mayan 12/21/12 thing failed to deliver.
Maybe pandemics would do the trick. Herpes, AIDS, Mad Cow, Bird Flu, Ebola, Zika... You'd think one of 'em would've wiped us out. But, motley mutts that humans are, we're pretty resistant to that sort of thing on the whole.
The latest impending doom is the EMP weapon frying everything electrical and smacking us back to the Dark Ages overnight. Because, apparently, backwards dictators in barely surviving countries struggling to master WWII level atomic and missile technology are somehow going to launch and detonate sophisticated, orbit-level, nuclear weaponry over US airspace without anybody noticing or getting in their way.
Maybe it's just human nature to focus on the dramatic, albeit rather unlikely doom-in-a-day events. The high probability civilization-ending scenarios tend to be complex, mundane, and/or politically incorrect. And real. Far too real for most people.
Prepping for the BIG SHTF KABOOM is kind of like a meatspace version of a role-playing video game. You can stuff your BOB, play with your guns, maybe go on a few camping trips for 'practice'. Mostly continue your Cornucopian life until IT happens.
Prepping for the permanent disintegration of the economy, infrastructure, and rule of law over the course of years is another thing entirely. You're not going to grab a bag and run for the hills just because power outages are getting more frequent, street violence more common, and inflation is spiraling up. Coping with those kinds of conditions involves significant life changes to become less dependent on the crumbling Cornucopian systems. Far more Little House On the Prairie and much less The Walking Dead. A bit boring for 21st Century popular culture, I'm afraid.
Problem is that the fervent belief in an imminent DAY of doom is the stuff of religious zealots... Who usually wind up being made fools when the END doesn't come on their prophesied schedule.
Just for fun, here's a link to Wikipedia's list of doomsday predictions.
On the other hand, civilizations DO collapse. The Minoan, Mycenaean, and Roman empires fell into Dark Ages. The Olmec and Maya...
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The Speed of Collapse is an odd thing. It usually happens faster than most people would have believed ahead of time, but somehow still slowly enough that people living through it don't fully appreciate the situation.
Sudden, catastrophic events are always a possibility. But obsessively preparing only for these and ignoring the much more likely less-dramatic crumbling of modern civilization is a bit crazy.
Back to Low-Nonsense Doomsteading.
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