Social crises are human-made, not natural. This is not about the disease. It's about fear of gov't, neighbors, and an obsession with a particular type of apocalyptic myth in the US. This spike indicates how much fear and myth are circulating in a moment of uncertainty. https://t.co/3DffPOo2YW
The dog whistle target of this Tweet and the comments that follow should be clear enough to anyone who has witnessed our increasingly savage culture wars.
In case it wasn’t, one of the comments provided a helpful re-Tweet that translates this for the Bible thumpers among us:
When I hear men worshipping guns and talking about how there’s nothing that will stop them from defending their family, my mind goes to Naaman in the Bible. Do you remember Naaman? He was a great military leader, and he also had leprosy.
I know, I know: this is silly on one level. Twitter is becoming the last refuge of folks from the Left and Right who express themselves with so little art and so much condescencion that they Tweet with all the time they saved by getting dis-invited from social events, family gatherings, etc.
But I think it establishes an important ground rule: don’t judge other people’s preps. You can offer advice, but in the end their circumstances are not yours and you cannot understand all of the elements of their decisionmaking. We are a nation of, what, 330 million people, with possibly as many individual sets of constraints, strengths and liabilities before them.
For instance, how do these two posters not know that some of these sales are in anticipation of the all too real possibility that emergency services are going to be overwhelmed by a surge of cases? How do they know they aren’t rural people, for whom protection by security services may have been a thin shield even before this current crisis happened?
I am guilty of breaking this rule. When this Covid-19 panic began I questioned, maybe even a little dismissively I am now embarassed to say, the folks who were stocking up on so much water. After all, municipal water supplies (the source of my own water) haven’t even been interrupted in Wuhan, China.
But now that I am sitting here shaking my head at these Tweets I wonder: were some of the people purchasing water on wells that might need service that might not be possible if we go into lockdown?
Tecumseh, whose image requires little excuse to embed in a post
Tecumseh once said “trouble no one about their religion”. Well, I think an analogous mandate should apply in the prepping discussion.
And even if some preps are silly, they probably do provide psychological reassurance that steadies a person emotionally, allowing them to make better decisions in the face of crisis. And that can be as important as material preps.
Because if normalcy goes away, “I’m not sure what it looks like after that.”
One thing you will learn about me quickly is that I have complete disdain for the mainstream media. But if you want to learn about life in about a week in many parts of the U.S. we have the following piece on Seattle from CNN.
And in a week normalcy will be a memory in Seattle. Probably two weeks for the rest of us.
It’s always the same old story. No one wants to see the danger until it’s staring them in the face.
The quote above is from the diary of Anne Frank, which I consider required reading for a prepper. (For the interested this is from the Thursday, February 3, 1944 entry.) I’ve been reminded of this quote as I have watched Covid-19 gather steam in the last week or two.
Many folks reflexively consider preppers to be crazy. And to be fair, some preppers are perhaps just a touch crazy (“I’m preparing for a hyperinflation that will set off a super volcano, which will cause a tsunami that will trigger a constitutional crisis which will lead to an earthquake by stockpiling 1.4 million rounds of 7.62X39mm ammo and 775,000 cans of tuna fish in caches I’ve hidden in my local park”). But I can’t help but to think that some part of the reaction by non-preppers is that they are pathologically reluctant to face the possibility of risk.
We also need to be fair about the speed with which this disease is moving: it doesn’t leave much time for stages of grief. But even then it would seem that many of the authorities have demonstrated a kind of gross inability to make obvious projections even a few days in advance. (Some are undoubtedly lying as well.) This is no “Orange Man Bad” rant: even our local public health authorities sound like clowns, to say nothing of local school officials and employers who appear to functionally have their head in the sand. And let’s face it: our leaders are partly a reflection of us. Most people still won’t turn and face this, and instead have retreated into denial.
Its almost as if preppers (at least some) are the people who chose to take a kind of red pill, while a lot of non-preppers are addicted to the associated blue pill.
This is already an important lesson I am going to take away from the Covid-19 episode. Yes, some preppers are nuts. But many, many non-preppers are suffering from an altogether different, and probably more dangerous, species of nuts. After all, what is the risk from caching 775,000 cans of tuna fish compared with not being prepared at all? * I suspected this already on some level, but it has become painfully obvious how true it is.
Anne was right.
* I am not advocating caching 775,000 cans of tuna. For one thing, I would probably rather be killed in the melt down than live to eat 775,000 cans of tuna fish.
North Carolina and Georgia lead the pack with 179% and 169% percent increases, but other states notable jumps include Pennsylvania (140%), Texas (128%), Florida (76%), Illinois (67%), New York (48%) and Ohio (40%). I suspect the absolute increases were strong in many other states, but they probably start from a higher base in terms of typical ammunition sales.
Speaking of starting from a low base, that’s maybe the only explanation I can think of why among calibers 40 S&W saw the biggest increase at a whopping 410%.
While the particulars here are from ammo.com’s numbers, I think we can assume this represents a fairly broad trend. And obviously this is Covid-19 driven phenomenon.
And Gold is up too. I have heard it said that ammo sales and gold often move together. Makes sense: both are types of insurance.
I am going to talk about prepping in part through a series
of rules or guidelines that have informed my prepping. In my last post I
introduced my number one rule (“Be the gray man”) because…hey, it’s
the number one rule.
And now I’ll skip to one of the last rules on my list,
because I think it is timely:
Rule 22. Don’t ignore experts, or follow them
Covid-19 is a complex foe. Though we are learning about it
faster than maybe any other pathogen in history (think of the terrifying
darkness that, for instance, surrounded the 1918-1919 Spanish flu) I suspect
that what we know now is only the slightest portion of what we will know in
only a few months.
There are a lot of questions, and many of them can only be
answered by folks with dense technical expertise in virology, medicine,
epidemiology, public health, hospital administration, etc.
At the same time it is already clear that the experts of the
moment are not infallible.
Take masks as a case in point. We are told not to buy masks because they cannot protect the general public and health care workers desperately need them for protection.
It should be self-evident that in some sense both of these claims cannot simultaneously be true. If they aren’t potentially protective then why do health care workers need them?
Now there are some complexities to proper mask usage. You need a fairly tight fit, no breaches in the seal (it’s time to shave your beard of Zeus), etc. But even health care workers fail these standards routinely (I have seen plenty of footage in the last few days of health care workers with clearly ill-fitting masks on, facial hair, etc.).
And you certainly could infect yourself by improperly
handling a mask that has Covid-19 on its exterior.
But couldn’t these issues be resolved with a simple public
information campaign?
It’s also true that an N95 mask won’t stop all virus
particles. But this seems like a silly framing of the issue: even military
grade full face CBRN masks are not an absolute guarantee of protection.
Surely properly used N95 masks must help inhibit some virus
contact and thus reduce risk. Again, why would health care workers need them
otherwise?
The suggestion that health care workers need these masks instead of us really means that there is a shortage of them in the health care system, at least compared with anticipated need. Now, there is some chutzpah in appeals to a shortage. At a minimum, to the extent that this is true much of our health care system failed to prep adequately. I’ve seen folks on Twitter who work in medical supplies argue that the rest of us just don’t understand that the health care sector runs on a just in time (JIT) supply model. They seem less aware of the implications of that statement for their credibility in lecturing us during an emergency.
I have also been trying to learn more about mask
distribution. I have some degree of skepticism that many of the masks ordinary
folks have bought really were in practice at the expense of the health care system.
Yes, there is a shortage of masks, but many of the masks available to us have
already travelled farther down the distribution chain from the bulk purchase
level where many health care facilities operate.
Nonetheless, if health care workers face critical shortages
of these masks, many will get sick. Some will die. And many others will die
because sickened health care workers couldn’t treat them.
The argument that masks can’t help the general public is kind of incredible. And many of those lecturing us about it played a role in bringing us to this sad pass. But nonetheless here we are: a shortage of masks could critically impair our health care response. And that means people will die. Maybe even someone you love.
So where does that leave us? First, this Covid-19 crisis isn’t your last rodeo. Preparation in advance, by ordinary people and health care institutions, could have averted this entirely. That does not help now but is a lesson that should be retained when this all over.
Second, if you’ve got masks keep them. But make them stretch
out as long as possible and only use them when it makes sense. And if you can,
give any masks you can spare to folks who don’t have them.
And if you have a really large number of them, consider
reaching out to your local health care provider to see if they could use some.
How many masks can you realistically use yourself? Put differently, if you are
putting yourself in situations where you need that many masks then you are
probably raising your risk profile. Maybe by a lot.
But perhaps most importantly remember this: experts and
authorities aren’t always wrong. But they aren’t exactly always right either.
And this isn’t the last time this will be true in this crisis. Think carefully
and critically about what you are being told. Cynicism isn’t sophistication,
but faith can be misplaced.
So let me say a little, but just a very little, about me.
I have been a prepper for around a decade. There were series of triggering events for me (e.g. watching the chaos and disruption in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, social distrubances in our increasingly polarized society, witnessing increasingly severe climate events, etc.). But I can’t really point to a particular moment when I became a prepper. It was more like an instinct that became more acute as time passed.
The birth of my son a few years after Katrina was a major milestone. I was responsible for the welfare of that little, dear life, and I realized I had a responsibility to anticipate and protect him.
I was quite lucky in that my wife was following a similar trajectory. (Spousal support and agreement has been an issue for some other preppers I know.)
As for my particulars:
I am middle aged. Gen X. I have an advanced degree in a technical field, but that doesn’t make me an expert in everything. Or maybe even anything.
I am unexceptional in appearance. A bit tall but that’s it. You wouldn’t think twice if I walked past you on the street.
I live in the suburbs. My neighborhood is a planned development of fairly recent vintage.
I am located in what some call the Southern Part of Heaven (i.e. south of the Mason-Dixon line) in an area that is an epicenter of the “knowledge economy”. In practice that means many of my friends, associates and acquaintances are reasonably smart people who also have acronyms after their names, are very focused and technically (if narrowly) skilled and tend to be hypercompetitive.
Most of them are also blind in some respects. The arrival of Covid-19 has burst many of their personal bubbles in very an unsettling way.
And that’s it. That’s all you get, or need, to know about me.
And maybe therein lies the most important rule of prepping: be secretive. Some refer to it as being “The Gray Man”: the one who doesn’t stick out.
Welcome to The Suburban Redoubt. This is a blog about preparing yourself and your family for significant social disruptions. It is a blog about prepping.
I have been a prepper for a while (more about that in another post) and have toyed with the idea of a prepper site for some time, if nothing else to share what I have learned as a prepper and learn myself from others who are following the same path.
The impetus for doing this now is the emergence of the novel coronavirus called Covid-19. As this virus has closed in on us, more and more family and friends have come to me for advice about how to prepare. This is what pushed me over the top to create a site.
I live in the burbs. It is in this context that I have existed and grown as a prepper. And while much that will be discussed here in the days, weeks, months and, if it works out, years to come is driven by that perspective, hopefully this blog will prove useful to folks in other kinds of communities. But to be sure, my target audience is the suburban prepper.
It is by this date (March 6, 2020) evident to everyone capable of recognizing risk at all that we may be in serious trouble with Covid-19. And so I do intend to talk about coronavirus, and more generally preparing for and surviving epidemics.
However, I imagine this blog will last past the present Covid-19 crisis. And toward that end this is probably the most important thing for you to know:
Covid-19 is probably not the worst disruption we are going
to face in our lives.
