Why We're Prepared

Prepping has a bad name. Of course it does. Its most visible proponents in the United States are at best center-right, if not far-right. Build your bunker, fill it with freeze dried food and bullets. Shoot anyone who comes near you or your family.

This isn’t a sensible approach to preparedness.

It’s also not what most people who value preparedness advocate or do, regardless of their politics. Just, again, some of prepping’s most visible advocates. Why is that?

Fear sells. The right wing has known that for a long time. “Immigrants are coming for your jobs.” “The CIA doesn’t want you to know the earth is flat.” “The second coming is right around the corner, repent.” It’s easy to motivate people through fear. And with prepping, when people are afraid, you can motivate them to buy things. Most preparedness is fear-based and focused on the acquisition of stuff. Not just any stuff, but stockpilable stuff. Got one rifle? Great, buy another. You can never have too many overpriced buckets of food, you can never have enough ammunition.

The most visible proponents of prepping are grifters. The left wing has its share of grifters too (and fear-mongering), but the right wing in particular is full of them. Which makes sense… it’s harder to make money selling classes about conflict de-escalation and consensus decisionmaking than it is to make money selling supplements that counteract the gay chemicals in the water or whatever. It’s harder to make money saying “bad things are coming, potentially, but we can work together and solve them” than saying “World War III is happening tomorrow and you need to buy more 30-round AR-15 magazines from my affiliate link if you’re going to survive.”

Yet even though the loudest voices are full of shit, people are preparing. People have always been preparing. Before the events of last week, when the billionaire class proved just how committed it was to cutting corners and refusing to plan for contingencies, I would have said that the two classes that know about preparedness are the working class and the rich, while only the middle class tends towards presuming the current systems will remain in place. Probably, such generalizations were bound to be wrong anyway. Still, people who live precariously are used to things not going their way and working around that. When I lived in squats, my fellow squatters were resourceful people. When I lived in my van, I knew all about things going wrong.

Preparedness is, at its core, just contingency planning. It’s saying “what if the systems that I currently rely on face interruptions in service?” Or just “what if my main plan doesn’t work.”

If I go to a show, and I expect to get out before the diner I want to eat at closes, I might want to have a backup plan in case the show runs late. Snacks in my purse or a can of chili in the car. (I’m probably alone in my love for room-temperature canned chili.)

If I go to a protest, my plan is to not get arrested. I might be anyway, so I want the legal number written on my body and/or memorized and I want someone to know where I am and notice if I don’t come home. 

When I drive, I expect my tires to remain free of nails. I carry a spare tire regardless.

Preparedness is just that. It’s having a plan, having a backup plan, and having a tertiary plan.

James Cameron, that Hollywood director, loves undersea exploration. He dove in a submersible, down to the Titanic. The submersible he used had systems, backup systems, and tertiary systems for communication and survival. The famed OceanGate submersible, of course, did not. Relying solely on your primary plan is a bad move.

That’s all. That’s what I’m here advocating. I’m here to say we should think things through. We should think about likely and unlikely scenarios and prepare for them.

People ask me how to start. The answer is fairly simple. First of all, remember that the first and smallest steps you take are the most likely to have the biggest impact. You’re more likely to lose power for one day than for a month, so the preparations you make for that one day matter the most.

Think of preparedness as a triangle (I like triangles). Three equal sides: resources, relationships, and skills. Work to your strengths and shore up your weaknesses.

For resources, I recommend that people have, if they can, three days worth of food and water stored where they live, plus enough backup battery power to keep your phone charged that long.

For relationships, I recommend people get to know their immediate neighbors. Introduce yourself. Learn who they are. When crises happen, these are the people that you will need to rely on. Not everyone is trustworthy, and it’s worth knowing that ahead of time as well.

For skills, I recommend people learn the basics of trauma first aid and take a Stop the Bleed class (whether under that name or not). This is useful for car accidents, gunfire, and natural disasters.

Think through the things that are likely to happen and prepare for those things. If you’ve still got the prepping bug after that, start thinking through things that are less likely to happen and prepare for those too.

If done right, preparedness actually reduces anxiety and fear. When I lived in my cabin in the forest, I worried about forest fire until I sat down and decided what I would do in case of forest fire. I made sure I had an emergency radio for alerts. I kept my go bag packed. I kept my car at least half full of gas at any given time. That’s all I was going to do to prepare for fire, so once I’d done that, I stopped worrying about it.

Preparedness is fun, too. Learning skills is fun. Getting to know people is rewarding. And uh… buying weird gear is good for a hit of dopamine, though that’s the part to be careful about. Expand your preparedness based on what’s rewarding.

I’m not here to tell you the world is ending. I’m here to say, as part of a chorus of voices, that the systems that we rely on as a civilization are showing their cracks. Anything could happen. “Anything” includes the status quo lumbering on. “Anything” also includes massive crop failure, commercial fishery collapse, wet bulb temperatures that are unlivable, the return of fascism as a political force, or nuclear exchange. Just as importantly, “anything” also includes a global grassroots direct action movement to mitigate the effects of climate change, destroy capitalism, and decentralize power across people through mutual aid and neighborhood assemblies.

The future, famously, is unwritten.

We aren’t the sole authors of that future, but we are among them.

So we plan for success and we plan for failure. We plan, we organize. We prepare.