Well, I don’t know if that title is how I would put it. But it does seem like we might be at a kind of inflection point, where an idea that had currency in a small minority, prepping, begins to achieve wider acceptance.
To be sure, the people clogging Costcos right now (probably helping to spread Covid-19 in the process) are not preppers. They are reactors. And some who currently contemplate a newfound commitment to prepping will forget and move on when the present crisis passes.
But I do think some see the need to make a change and start being prepared for the possibility of a significant social disruption. And make no mistake, significant social disruption is likely in the cards. That the Covid-19 crisis may leave many folks in better shape for future problems might be a small silver lining in this cloud.
This evening the local news had a special on covid-19. An economist opined that this could cause a recession. On the other hand, if there was some good news, such as a fall in cases in Italy, it could rally people’s spirits and make them think everything was going to be alright. I got stuck on the thought of people’s “spirits” and how they shaped personal trajectories thus far in this story.
Though I have prepped for a decade, this has been the first
really big crisis I have experienced as a prepper. We’ve had weather threats
and stuff like that, but those were all at best local threats. This is the
first really big disruption I have seen. Put differently, this is the first dry
run for something even remotely approaching SHTF.
Now, before proceeding, let’s characterize this event. It is
the biggest thing that has happened to many of us, but there have been some
saving graces. It happened slowly enough that anyone who was paying attention
had the time to make at least adequate preparations for, say, bugging in to
ride it out (whether they have the resources to do so is admittedly a different
story). Moreover, this is a crisis that has not so far impacted vital systems:
the lights are still on, the gas pumps are still running, the store shelves are
still more or less stocked, etc.
This has been a comparatively forgiving event, at least compared with some plausible and serious alternatives (such as the grid going down, a virus that had a higher “Rho naught” combined with much higher mortality and morbidity, etc.).
One of the major lessons I am going to take from this experience is how badly so many folks process risk. The won’t see obvious threats approaching and then will react in a fashion that does nothing (angry Tweets really make a difference!) or, in a smaller and more intimate social unit where they might have more influence, is actually counterproductive. On an intellectual level I already understood this, but it somehow looms much larger in my thinking after watching the past few weeks.
The vast majority of people I encountered did not see the Covid-19 tsunami coming, even as they were obviously in its shadow. Really, their falure to pay attention was just incredible and could only be explained beyond a certain point by denial. And now when they have finally acknowledged this great, awful wave..
Anger. The dominate gear for many is anger. They are angry and want someone to pay. Some blame China. Some drove ever deeper into the labyrinth of “Orange Man Bad”.
Some of the angry are simply panicking. Some are disappearing into blame game escapism. Many instant public health experts explain that this is only happening because we don’t have enough test kits. The shortage of test kits has been really lamentable, but no, this was going to happen regardless because we were never going to detect most of the cases in time due to the nature of this virus. This morning I heard someone on YouTube explain slightly caustically that Italy is in trouble because they did not have total surveillance immediately: you see, as he so plainly explains, a nation needs to detect all with cough, fever, myalgia, aches, etc. and quarantine them and they need to do that before the health system even notices cases. Lets not focus on complication, such as that there is literally no way to do this in a Western democracy.
Others suddenly and angrily push “solutions” that are just punches in the air. And they can never understand why they those solutions haven’t been implemented yesterday (back when they were personally still in denial, that is). Some argue that we need immediately to test everyone and that will solve the problem, but that would likely put us in an entirely different crisis as we drowned in a sea of false positives. Others argue that we need to adopt China’s “get tough” measures. Mind you many of these folks split their time between this demand and insisting that Trump is a dictator, but what I think all sensible people can agree on is that Chinese solutions probably wouldn’t work in the U.S. You’ve got that who nagging problem of a different society with different political and institutional structures, culture, history, laws, etc.
Then you have a final, and rather amazing group: those who
still think there is no problem, even as they feel the first mist of the
tsunami upon their cheeks.
The problem with people who process risk poorly is that they are a liability when difficult, evidence-based decisions need to be made. Emotion and psychology enter too deeply in their process, and that more often than not leads us to do stupid things that enhance risk.
A lot of lone wolf preppers are probably nodding in approval at this point. They plan to rely on no one but themselves. This has the advantage of insulating yourself from dependency on people who make poor risk choices. But there are probably instances where all of us make poor decisions and one of the great things about a social unit is that it provides a check on our errors and excesses. Moreover, socieities cast a broader net in terms of information gathering. And society is really critical to things like specialization, emotional support, defense, etc.
A core assumption behind lone wolf prepping is that you can make better decisions than others (or, alternatively, better at making them in isolation) and execute them better on your own. The first assumption is questionable. At a minimum lone individuals are probably generally at an information disadvangtage. Per the second, while there is probably some speed advantage to being alone, the Rambo myth is just that: in the tactical arena individuals rarely if ever defeat teams. There is no reason to believe that gathering resources, performing tasks, etc. would be any different.
So where does that leave us? As preppers we need to build a social network for mutual support in a massive disruption. But we clearly have to be a little selective about who we choose. A lot of folks are a liability in bad times. This happens to perfectly encapsulate my person rules 6 and 7:
6. Community
7. Let the right ones in
Lone wolves will probably not make it. But neither will a society of clowns. Strike the balance between the two.
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.
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.
