Let's Make 2024 the Year of Preparedness

Even though we're... probably... not going to have a civil war in the US this year.

We’re probably not going to have a civil war in the US this year.

Sometimes I like to think of things as percentile chances–there’s a 80% chance I’ll get picked up hitchhiking in the next hour; there’s a 30% chance that person has a crush on me back; there’s a 10% chance I’ll get arrested at this demonstration. Things like that. I never got into gambling, so I never thought in terms of “odds.” Just percent chance. There’s no way to figure out if I was right, of course, because I’ll never get a bird's eye view the forking realities of the multiverse, but it’s worked for me.

We’re probably not going to have a civil war in the US this year. I’d say it’s, I don’t know, a 5% chance.

The other thing I do besides calculate chance using fuzzy logic is play Dungeons & Dragons, and in Dungeons & Dragons you roll a lot of 20-sided dice. If you roll a 1, bad things happen. If you roll a 20, good things happen. Each of those numbers is a five percent chance. They come up again and again. Five percent is awfully high.

We’re probably not going to have a civil war in the US this year.

The way things stand, right now as I type this, Trump is ahead in the polls by a narrow margin, but numerous states are working to keep him off the ballot, owing to his position as an accused insurrectionist. Of course, he hasn’t been convicted of anything, so the legality or morality of keeping him off the ballot is questionable in the minds of an awful lot of voters. Meanwhile, Biden tanked what little goodwill he had with anyone under the age of 50 by directly and materially supporting a genocide in Palestine.

I find most election analysis tedious and I’m not going to predict the polls. What I’m concerned about is how people react to the election, however it goes. Trump and his base didn’t react well to the last election. They might not react well to the next one. It doesn’t help that getting elected is Trump’s best chance of staying out of prison.

I don’t know what’s going to happen this year, but I know what might happen, and I also know that it behooves us to prepare for contingencies.

2023 was also the year that the climate crisis became inescapable and undeniable. Wherever you live, natural disasters will only become more present in your life.

2024 is, basically, a really good year to start preparing. Action, acting with agency, is the key to avoiding despair and anxiety.

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I think a lot about the winter solstice, the darkest time of year. I think a lot about how it is darkest not at the end of winter, not in the middle of winter, but at the beginning of winter. The light is returning as the world gets colder. There is a lag between the promise of warmth and the thawing of spring. There is a lag between the promise of better days and the fulfillment of that promise. 

More and more people understand what is happening to the world and are prepared to act. More and more people are rising up–twenty years ago, for example, I never would have imagined such overwhelming support for Palestine against Israeli apartheid and genocide. Whether this support will translate into stopping that horror, we have yet to see. It’s still a seachange moment.

There’s one other tide that has turned, one that caught me by surprise. One that seems inconsequential from the outside, but might turn out to be monumentally important: the preparedness community is shifting from a right wing, individualistic focus to a community-minded one. There are more and more of us in “prepper” circles who understand that retreating to family bunkers is one of the worst possible strategies. It’s not that preparedness is swinging leftward, necessarily, as much as it’s depoliticizing away from the far right.

This is good. I don’t want the preparedness space to become specifically anarchist or far left, because in the end that’s just a replication of the bunker mentality I reject. The entire purpose of community preparedness is to encourage a wide swath of people to be prepared, so that we’ll be better equipped to take care of ourselves and one another during crisis.

I tell you all of this to tell you that there is room for you in prepper circles, room for people who understand that it’s by building societies and taking care of one another that humans have made it as long as we have, that all of our best works have come about through cooperation.

Well, unless there’s a civil war, in which case we’ll be cooperating with some people and not with others.

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2024 can be the year of preparedness, and here’s how I propose we start:

• As individuals and households, begin to prioritize preparedness. 

• Get to know your neighbors and all of the intersecting communities in your geographic area.

• Coordinate skillshares and conferences to bring together people who are interested in skill- and resource-sharing.

• Prepare for conflict

Prioritize Preparedness

One of the great lies of modern society is that the needs of the individual and those of the community need to be at odds with one another. Individual and community preparedness dovetail perfectly with one another. When we make ourselves more resilient as individuals or households, we put ourselves in a better position to help others. What’s more, preparedness, done right, is a bit contagious.

One of the strange lies of old school prepper lore is that you should hide the fact that you are prepared. Old school prepper lore is a bit obsessed with a zombie mentality–that even your former friends will become your enemies as they, like herd animals, come to steal all your hard-earned resources. But by being open about your interest in preparedness, you are encouraging other people to make similar decisions, and soon you might have an entire prepared community.

It’s true that a single prepper cannot meet the needs of an entire community. But when each, or most, or even just many, members of that community are prepared, then yes, the entire community’s needs can be met.

So the first step on your preparedness journey will likely be to start being prepared yourself or with your household. What exactly this looks like will be up to your own interests and strengths… in a lot of ways, preparedness is simply an explosion of hobbies. Learning first aid, or radio communication, or food preservation, is fun and rewarding on its own.

I would encourage you to set up some of the absolute basics for yourself and then branch out from there. What would you need to comfortably survive an ice storm that knocks out power and shuts down the roads for three days? What would you need to evacuate from a forest fire? 

By preparing for three days stuck in your house without power, you can learn the basics of home preparedness that you can later expand upon. You might want at the very least:

• Three days of easily prepared food, roughly 2000 calories per adult per day.

• Three days worth of water, roughly one gallon of water per person per day.

• A first aid kit with at least bandages, antibiotic ointment, over the counter medications, tourniquet, and a wound irrigation syringe

• Enough backup batteries to keep your phone charged

• Headlamps and flashlights

• A camping stove to heat food

By preparing to evacuate on short notice from disaster, you are learning the basics of, well, evacuation. You might want at the very least:

• If you drive, to keep your vehicle fully charged or with a gas tank that is at least half full

• A go bag for every member of the household

• A default plan of how to leave the area and where to go

After the basics, preparedness gets more fun. What are you interested in? What skills have you always wanted to develop, or what skills do you already have that can be reworked to support preparedness?

Neighbors

Most of the time, when we speak about community, we speak about people we have some affinity for. Most communities are built from people with shared interests over a small or medium-sized geographic area. Like all the RPG nerds in a city, or all of the punks who go to the same bar. Those are important communities, but during a lot of crises, “community” is less likely to be built upon shared interests and more likely to consist of the people who are immediately near you. The people who live in your apartment building or on your cul-du-sac or in your tent village or in your holler.

Capitalism has us all increasingly isolated from those in our proximity, and it is useful, radical work to break that isolation. This doesn’t mean we should necessarily get in one another’s business, or that we should become best friends with the people we’re near, but it’s worth knowing them. If nothing else, it helps you know who you can trust in a crisis.

Getting to know the people around you also helps break us out of the echo chambers that are leading to the brink of civil war. It helps us find commonalities, when we can.

Etiquette around getting to know people is going to vary so wildly it’s hard to generalize best practices. Where I live, my neighbor brought me cookies when I moved in, and we text each other whenever the power goes out (quite a common occurrence in underserved mountain communities). Where I lived before, we built an awning for our neighbor in exchange for his help with his occasional help with his tractor. He’d never really met nonbinary people before, and exposure to us helped inoculate him from the right wing culture war talking points.

Most people reading this probably live a little less rurally, though, and will need different strategies that involve fewer tractors. They might still involve cookies.

Skillshares

Last year I helped with an event that I want to encourage you to replicate.

At a social center in Tucson, Arizona, while I was visiting, we held a day of workshops on preparedness. Local mutual aid groups and activists presented on everything from water to mesh networks. The social center provided lunch and a potluck provided dinner. Everyone gathered to talk about disaster resilience in the area–what threats did people face, what resources and skills did people have to offer, who needed help.

My friend coordinated a bulk order of beans and rice through a food distributor, and with mylar bags, plastic buckets, oxygen absorbers, and a hair iron, we taught how to prepare food for long term storage. Everyone who participated went home with a five gallon bucket of food, with costs split on a sliding scale–some people paid nothing, some people paid for themselves and others.

It was a complete success, and the model seems easily replicable. People left with storable food, new skills, and new contacts. I’ll be trying to coordinate similar events this year where I can, but I encourage everyone reading this to consider what they can do to bring people together to discuss and learn.

Conflict

Most of the time, we are preparing for “crisis” in a vague sense, or for various natural disasters. It’s 2024, and I’m a trans woman living rurally in a red state, so I am also preparing for conflict. To be clear, I don’t believe my neighbors are all just waiting on a chance to turn on me. While there are more trump flags than rainbow flags on houses in my area, the most common flags are like, drawings of bunnies that say “spring.”

Throughout most of my life, the center-right has not been my enemy any more than, say, the center-left. The “right wing” issues people around here care about are their right to drive the pickup trucks they need to carry gravel and their right to own the firearms they use to put food on their plates and scare off their abusive ex-husbands.

I mourn the culture wars that are splitting the country apart because the idea of my neighbors drifting further into the right wing, into the realm of bigotry and hatred, is abhorrent and terrifying. I know that if there were a civil war, this place would–once again–become brother vs brother in a very literal sense, and I may or may not be safe here.

But the culture war is happening, and consensus reality itself has been broken in this country, and it’s possible it will rupture rather than wind up repaired.

So my preparation includes preparation to defend myself and to participate in community defense.

In the first American civil war, the pro-slavery army had an initial leg up because it came from a culture that was familiar with firearms. Of course, the North had industrial production on its side that no amount of rugged frontiersmanship could overcome, but it’s worth acknowledging that the pro-slavery side started off with an advantage.

Familiarizing ourselves with firearms, for self-defense or for community defense, is an unfortunately useful part of preparedness in the current crisis. Of course, not everyone can, or should, decide to make handling firearms a regular part of their life. Preparing for conflict just as easily can mean learning trauma first aid. It can mean learning radio communications. It can mean drone hacking. It can mean studying strategy and supply chain logistics. It can, and must, mean conflict resolution and de-escalation. It can mean figuring out how to help people escape geographic areas to safety.

It also means reaching out to people who are falling further right and helping rein them in. Every person you stop from becoming a Nazi is one less Nazi, and they’re someone who is well-positioned to prevent other people from becoming Nazis.

The best way to survive a civil war is to figure out ways for us to not have a civil war.

Yet, to look again at the first civil war, it took 360,000 Union soldiers losing their lives to end legal chattel slavery in the US. They died ending one of the greatest evils in the history of the world. The Union was a flawed, capitalist, racist state, but those who died fighting against slavery did something meaningful with their lives.

Everyone who was alive in 1860 died eventually, somehow or another. We all die somehow or another. Those who died young in the service of human freedom did not live less important lives than those who survived the war.

I hope we don’t have a war, but the only thing worse than a civil war that I can imagine is the uncontested ascension of white christian nationalism, so I’m looking to be prepared for conflict.

2024 is the year of preparedness, for whatever crises we may face. I hope you’ll join me.