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I am a gray man

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.

So maybe that is the point of this post:

Rule 1. Be the Gray Man.

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Welcome

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.

We need to get ready.