Jim:
I’ve been reading your blog for some months and went out and purchased “Patriots”
After reading your ‘Precepts’, I thought I would drop you a note. because I have always appreciated anyone that agrees with me.
First, I am a retired cop and a retired soldier so I have studied people in one career and weapons and equipment in another. I have been to a number of Third World countries and learned that what we have now is unbelievably good and where we might be going is will be unbelievably, well, sad.
I decided a very long time ago that the best place to live for my family would be a rural town. I did not want kids to grow up in an urban setting and having grown up myself in a suburban setting, I didn’t want to inflict that on them either.
So we moved. It was a shock at first. The nearest fast food was almost twenty miles away in any direction and the nearest traffic light is seventeen miles away, even today, twenty-five years later.
The town I chose was twenty miles from the nearest Interstate and even a couple of miles from nearest state highway. It is in the center of one the largest agricultural areas in the country and has its own grain elevator and storage business.
That means at any time of the year, there are upwards of 5,000 tons of corn and soybean stored within the town limits. You know, “the perimeter”.
I had often thought that if given the means, I would like to own a house on a hilltop with cleared fields of fire and a view of the surrounding area. But that wasn’t practical and as time has proven, it wasn’t even smart.
If you’re going to have a survival retreat, it would be best if you already lived there. If the necessity ever arose, I don’t think I would want to have to fight my way out of the city or suburbs.
In “Patriots”, you describe a survival group that spent a great deal of time preparing for the “what if?” I did the same thing but I chose was to have all those skills that you searched for and recruited all ready present.
Farm communities already have a host of survival skills that are needed ready made. In our town, of less than a thousand, are welders (and equipment) fabricators (and their tools) food, fuel, military veterans, plenty of weapons and folks that have already spent a lot of times together dealing with blizzards, electrical storms, and power outages and all those things that bind a small community together.
We have some good people here and should the occasion arise, I think we could make a pretty good stand. Organization is key, of course. To that end, I have been active in the town in the past , my last police job before going back in the Army was Chief of Police here. I made a pretty good name for myself and I continue to help out in the town whenever I can.
Someone that I have absolutely no respect for once said, “it takes a village” and in this case, she was right. We are far away from the nearest urban areas, have food and water available and our folks every day work skills translate very quickly into survival skills.
I wanted to share the thought because I think most people who are planning to attempt to escape from the urban areas when the SHTF may be much better served if they would make that escape before it happens. My very best to you, – JCH