Adaptation is Key to Survival, by B. L.

B.L.
I agree that we prepare for “anything that drastically changes your (our) life.”
I like seeing that thought in writing. We all think about preparing for the big one but we need to understand that hiccups occur too.
I personally start with my relationship with God. Jesus is the ultimate force multiplier.

I believe you are on the right track.

Great writeup about your epiphany. Thank you for sharing. You don’t mention much about God’s power in your life. I suggest you give him an opportunity.

Regarding building yourself into a network, I offer these techniques to others:

I moved to a new rural neighborhood and am making it a point to stop and meet people who are out doing things. And I invest a few bucks here and there to build community. I bought a 6 dollar gallon of milk from one guy a mile away. I bought two dozen organic eggs from a small farmer just down the road for 10 bucks. But I don’t spend that high price for common commodities regularly or indiscriminately.

Those two small purchases bought me two 30 minute conversations on their livestock, poultry, and intensive greenhouse operations. And I got their email, phone, names, and most importantly initiation of personal relationships.

Another couple was building a fence on the road so I took 20 cents worth of cold bottled water and walked down the road to them and offered it. With acceptance, I got to meet them and get their perspective on neighbors in the hood, learned he has an airplane and is an exerienced electronics repairman, Navy veteran, black powder enthusiast, and ham radio operator.

Thanks again for bringing up the knowledge and community building aspects of thriving survival.

Wheatley, I like your approach! & I hope it leads to friendships with like-minded people in your area. Best wishes & God bless!

Thanks to BL for bringing the topic up. I get good mileage from Forward Observer subscription. And “Map your Neighborhood” has additional moon meaning for me… as in the book Patriots.
Best wishes!

Hi Wheatly, I think I’ll take a page out of your book and go meet the egg sellers in our neck of the woods. I’d wondered how to get to know the neighbors short of joining the CERT and mapping my neighborhood (that’s another way to be part of the community and find out who is like minded and who is not).

McBlue, be bold in greeting and smiles. You can always change demeanor later. It’s hard work for me at times to keep from filling all my data in attempts to establish rapport, and after meeting people, I try to keep notes on topics for memory booster. Especially when someone shares that their (pick a telative) is an agency/official/LEO, or such. God Bless.

B.L., great article. Thanks for sharing your journey and how your viewpoints grew with time. Adaptation is one of the most important tools a human being has in their toolkit, and becomes even more important in times of chaos and stress.

Like you, I’ve had the prepper mentality for as long as I can remember. If you needed a rubber band, a tiny screwdriver, a Tylenol or band-aid, a packet of crackers, a sample size sunscreen, a lighter, dental floss, nail clippers, I had it in my purse.

I was in my heyday with the advent of Y2K, and began to fully realize how fragile the veneer of civilization is, and how easy it would be for the whole system to collapse. I had an epiphany about 14 years ago, when I went to Walmart one Black Friday morning at 4:30 a.m. and mingled with about 2,000 tatooed and hoodied thugs waiting in line. Everyone was kind of sleepy and quiet at oh-dark-thirty, but gosh there were a lot of them. In a grid down situation, these and about a million more just like them would be my competition. Yikes. That was the day I set my compass on relocation to a rural area.

It also inspired me to learn about self defense and I began acquiring weapons and ammo and the training to use them effectively. I broadened my preps to include medical supplies and more of what I commonly ate to rotate out. During a mandated 15% pay cut in 2009, I ended up eating from my preps and was so glad to have that as a back up. The experience also showed me how incredibly fast your food preps disappear once you start using them. We are so habituated to stopping at the grocery store every few days, you just don’t realize the amount that is being consumed.

I also began collecting information and books for post-TEOTWAWKI rebuilding of society. I had a dollar book store near where I lived, and I would stop on my way home from work to scan the new arrivals. I have books on emergency medicine and dentistry, construction and plumbing, welding, animal husbandry, U.S. and world history, world atlas and maps, math and physics, drafting, philosophy, children’s educational books, Constitutional law, dictionaries, and lots more. A dollar a book, great investment.

Once I made my move to the American Redoubt, it became a great comfort to get to know so many independent, self-sufficient, grounded people of like mind. I continue to learn about homesteading and canning, gardening (it’s harder than it looks), and networking in the neighborhood. I’ve turned the corner from merely “surviving” to “thriving”. Thanks for your very interesting article, it brought back a lot of great memories of my own journey.

Great discussion on the importance of community!

Good article , It’s the real deal. Friends are more valuable than gold, knowing your neighbors is a good start. Making community is the only long term realistic survival plan. God in your life is what makes it all worthwhile. God’s grace is worth far more than any bunker. The rich will learn that the hard way….God bless this page and all who read it…

I really liked this article. It reinforces that prepping isn’t something you do in addition to daily life; it’s how you live your daily life. Just like religion, it doesn’t do much good if you don’t practice. And it’s amazing what cool and useful information the neighbors have and would love to share if people just act friendly and respectful. Wish you all the best in your prepping.

As a recent post over at SHTF Plan emphasized, it’s also essential to have fun while prepping and planning, and to keep a light-hearted approach to the whole thing. Gloomy Gus and Gayle are not good trench partners, and you may as well have a laugh or two along the way, else, what’s a heaven for?

I agree with your article to a point. IMHO NW most likely will never happen since the elites of the world want usable resources and fallout would destroy there use for many generations.

Neutron bombs of course would take out the people and leave the resources intact…. This would be a worst case scenario but if they were pushed to that level they would do so without hesitation.

More likely they would push a EMP/biological/chemical style scenario to cull the population and/or the environment short/medium term. This we see happening now with Fukushima (slow extension level event) which has destroyed the Pacific ocean and is now destroying food supplies along the western coast of North America. This does not even take into affect the 5 major plastic dumping grounds in the world oceans destroying marine aquatic life.

This is why I believe having a hidden, well stocked bunker is require and accentual for surviving, not only the beginning, but the long term environmental disasters awaiting us. It is much easier to ride out volcanic, biological, chemical and long term storms underground than above ground. Look at the stories accumulated from the native Indian tribes of resurfacing from underground to reestablish there above ground homes after many generations below.

Nope I will continue to believe one can survival much of the climatic and social destruction to come underground.

May I suggest that some in your group should consist of those raised in the 50’s and 60’s,
Some of us learned from parents and grandparents who lived through the Depression.
We don’t run and jump much, but can still reach out and “touch someone”. Some of us know how to use “Cordless tools”, and historic ways of making do with what we have.
Some in their 7th or 8th decade have had some pretty good training at Government expense. Just something to consider.

This is such good advice. We senior preppers have knowledge and living history that bridges over a hundred years, if we listened to our grandparents stories, which of course we did. My mother’s mother was born in 1894, so yes, I have knowledge about things younger people just didn’t have the opportunity to grow up with. My grandma kept 5 children and a husband alive and healthy through the Spanish flu epidemic in New York. She was a great cook and could make dinner appear out of virtually nothing. She made everyone’s clothes including coats and suits, using the finest hand stitching. She taught me about Jesus, and sat in her rocking chair reading the Bible and praying aloud to Jesus for her family to be blessed. She was alive before electricity and automobiles. I do wish some younger people had the time to listen and learn, but they never seem to realize the buried treasure. So busy.

You have to understand that the “Lone Wolf” scenario is a Liberal/Leftist plight for our society. Identity politics, was the catalyst of the Third Reich, and is pitting social groups against one another.

Just look at the NFL players taking a knee while our decorated veteran with no legs is signing the national anthem to them. The NFL says it is to protest police violence against one race, but that race is murdering its own in Chicago every weekend, but no NFL call for social injustice in Chicago.

It goes beyond that, as Liberal/Leftists are usurping the Founding Fathers’ free enterprise system of capitalism [after all God is a Capitalist as he doles out rewards in Heaven on the individual’s good works and doesn’t do a number count in Heaven to dole out rewards equally to all], by their diversity hiring practices. This mocks God’s reward system when a higher qualified candidate is overlooked for employment to place in a lesser qualified or even unqualified person in position due to identity politics [being a woman, African American, or GLBTB].

What I’m getting at, when the Leftists take back the House/Senate and are in “control” that their special groups, they carved out just for their votes [creating victims out of groups that Liberals illustrate they’ll tackle to make them whole], will be given “things” [food, water, shelter, protection] through legislating laws and those not in the Left’s diversity [Christians, Conservatives, Preppers, et al.] are to be selectively left out of the Leftist socialist benevolence. Look no further than B. Hussein O. #44. There will be another that comes soon and one might call it the Fourth Reich.

That’s why we need to ban together, and not be the Lone Wolf. We will never make it, with that tremendous force against us. I know God can carry us through anything but He doesn’t call us to be stupid.

Good article!