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.