Luck favors the prepared
Teaching prepping
I'm generally not a fan of prepper culture. A lot of people who self identify as preppers strike me comfortably well off people fantasizing about playing hero in some post-apocalyptic movie.
We currently have plenty of dire, catastrophic situations ruining lives all over the planet. There is a huge housing crisis and rising homelessness and for every single person on the street, the shit has already hit the fan and you people probably don't care one teensy tiny itty bitty bit and are probably happy to agree with the Overton Window practice of blaming the homeless and assuming they are all junkies and crazies, and never mind that EVEN if that were true -- and it's NOT -- people don't wake up one morning and put "homeless junkie and crazy person" on their bucket list and set out to arrange it.
My father grew up on a farm during the Great Depression and was career military. My ex husband was career military. My mother grew up in Germany during WW2 and it's aftermath.
A lot of practices that preppers see as prepper culture was just called "life" in my family and "common sense." I absolutely knew how to shoot a gun and a bow and we had sharpening stones at home to keep knives properly sharp and I went hunting and fishing.
We had a garden outback that supplied part of our vegetables and Dad's hunting helped put meat on the table and my mother took me mushroom picking in the woods behind our house and fried them up with butter.
My mother had an extensive first aid kit and routinely patched up neighbor kids whose parents packed similar and were less likely to take them to a doctor because they weren't career military, so they didn't have free medical care.
I used to watch Storm Stories on the Weather Channel when that was one of the few channels we had because we couldn't afford cable. One episode covered a family that got lost in the woods and stuck outside during a snow storm in the mountains.
I spent the entire episode rolling my eyes and having zero sympathy for this family because from my perspective this was a situation they largely created.
It was a father and children who went to cut their own Christmas tree and lost track of where they were in relation to the vehicle. They also were not adequately dressed, had no food or drink because they saw it as a minor errand and apparently paid zero attention to the weather reports because they again saw it as a minor errand akin to driving to a nearby store and purchasing a Christmas tree only slightly more fun or something.
I don't think I have previously written about it because I know my opinion makes me sound like a callous jackass.
But I've done a lot of traveling, often as a mom with young kids in tow, and I have a long history of not wearing much for the local weather and I can do that because it's habit for someone in the family to check the weather to plan our activities around it.
I cannot imagine going into the woods and not checking the weather beforehand and getting caught up in looking at trees as prospective Christmas trees to the point of getting lost and unable to find my vehicle without something unexpected happening, like running into a grizzly bear and having my plans completely derailed by that incident.
I think if I wanted to teach something prepping related I would look up articles about how people assess risk. Humans frequently invest more emotional energy in things they fear for some reason than in things actually statistically likely to happen to them, and then act all shocked when the statistically likely thing happens and it goes badly because they aren't prepared.
Often, the difference between a disaster and an inconvenience is preparation.
People these days routinely downplay serious events that should have been much worse and pooh-pooh the prior predictions when it turns out better than expected because someone MADE that happen.
I've spoken to programmers who pulled overtime to make sure Y2K wasn't a global financial meltdown and when the year 2000 arrived and the results was that VCRs couldn't be programmed anymore and people with five years of flour in their basement looked silly, their boss rolled their eyes at how much money was "wasted" on paying them overtime "because NOTHING happened."
Similarly, people have largely forgotten about how fear gripped the globe when Saddam Hussein left Kuwait and set fire to hundreds of oil wells on his way out. It was predicted that the fires would burn for YEARS and be a global environmental catastrophe.
It was such a concern for the world that crack teams from around the world converged upon Kuwait and invented new methods for putting out oil fires on the spot. The result: They were extinguished in a matter of months.
The fires were started in January and February 1991, and the first oil well fires were extinguished in early April 1991, with the last well capped on November 6, 1991.It was predicted by experts that the fires would burn for between two and five years before losing pressure and going out on their own.
People are terrible at predicting the future and even worse at gauging the road not taken.
I have more firsthand experience with gauging the road not taken than average in part because I have a very serious medical condition and I know how that's supposed to look compared to the path I have actually taken.
The rest of the planet dismisses me as a loon making stuff up who "just got lucky" but doesn't actually know anything medically speaking.
A nonmedical anecdote from my life comes from the years I spent homeless.
While homeless in Fresno, California, the long drought finally broke. I woke up in a puddle and walked out past our "back up plan" under a bridge where we had previously brilliantly camped under a bridge on round riverbed rocks imagining "This must have been a riverbed a hundred years ago."
It was probably under ten feet of water and the worst of the rain was still on the way. We realized later it had been a riverbed until the drought started five years earlier and we were fools who should not have ever camped there.
I borrowed money and took a bus to the cheapest dive hotel I could find twelve to fourteen miles away and spent three nights in a hotel. We spent that time scheduling food pick up from a nearby eatery for the breaks in the light rain, wondering if we were fools who had made a terrible financial mistake.
We then returned to our usual stomping grounds. There were trees with no leaves and trees missing branches and giant puddles everywhere. The course of the river has permanently changed and several of our prior camp sites were under water or on newly formed islands we couldn't access.
The public bathroom in the park that homeless people sometimes slept in overnight when it stormed had multiple puddles on the floor.
I spent the next few days reading news reports about people who died in the storm.
I don't know how to convince people that the difference between disaster and inconvenience often comes down to planning and preparation.
I also don't know how to convince people of the glaringly, stupidly obvious fact that lack of affordable housing is the primary root cause of homelessness.