
These Suburban Preppers Are Ready for Anything - sergeant3
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2015/Suburban-Survivalists/
======
CapitalistCartr
I love seeing people hoard seeds. Anyone who actually does garden for a hobby
knows seeds are the least of it. Many modern strains are bred to be used with
synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and won't do well without them. Gardening
requires practice, good soil, and a knowledge of what to do with the result. A
good garden is likely several years to decades old. Try gardening sometime
first.

I'm not a prepper; I am a hobby gardener, though; I'm a hiking, backpacking,
camping enthusiast; I'm a practical homeowner who comes from a blue collar
background and owns a decent collection of tools which I use regularly. I live
in a hurricane zone, so I keep lamps and extra food on hand. So what does a
prepper do different? Every one I've met doesn't use their stuff.

~~~
tcdent
It amazes me, too. If you are so enamored with 'preparing' for a particular
lifestyle, why not live it?

It's the same with the 'survival' crowd. They don't go camping, they
"practice".

Makes me wonder if it's just an excuse to consume.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Makes me wonder if it's just an excuse to consume._

Never underestimate an American's belief that any problem can be solved by
shopping.

------
DanAndersen
I grew up in a Mormon household, and I still think that the practice of
keeping food storage and 72-hour kits is one of the smartest practices in that
culture. I still keep a bag of emergency supplies in my apartment and car, and
even though I'm just a grad student who doesn't have like a two-year supply of
wheat and water, having a small supply is a good idea in case of short-term
disaster in your area. Furthermore, I find such practices encourage me to buy
certain kinds of food in bulk, which has been better on my wallet. It's hard
for me to understand some of my fellow students who let their kitchens go
completely empty on a regular basis.

~~~
smacktoward
I tend to agree, but I also think there's a balance to be struck.

It is a _very_ good idea to keep a few days' worth of non-perishable food and
water on hand, even in the absence of an apocalyptic "SHTF" scenario. Things
happen. A few years back my town was hit by a hurricane, and our water was out
for three days after an electrical failure fouled the municipal purification
systems. I had enough bottled water on hand to ride that out comfortably,
which was nice.

But that's not "prepping" so much as just common sense. Building a fortified
cabin in the woods and stocking it with AR-15s is something else entirely.
It's getting ready for a scenario that I'm not sure it's entirely possible to
ever be "ready" for.

~~~
alphapapa
Seriously. Just play a few hours of DayZ and you learn that there is no such
thing as a stronghold if the enemy has the same guns you do. In fact, being
stuck in one place makes you extremely vulnerable. If a fight happens, people
on both sides will die. And no matter how well you shoot, you'll run out of
ammo, or just get shot by a guy you couldn't see.

That is the problem I see with this kind of "prepping": its isolationism. The
focus in such a situation should not be an every-man-or-family-for-itself
attitude. The focus should be on getting all the people who aren't "zombies"
together to begin rebuilding long-term living solutions.

Besides, turning away starving people and keeping everything for yourself is
just plain wrong.

All that is not to say that there wouldn't be "bandits", and that it wouldn't
be necessary to defend the "good guys." But the fundamental attitude seems
wrong to me.

------
aaronbrethorst

        "[Hurricane Katrina's] aftermath was a wake-up call for thousands
        of Americans. “It taught people you could go hungry, thirsty, and
        even die in the U.S. before the government could save you.”
    

Sure, if you're poor and black[1], and the government happened to put someone
profoundly unqualified in charge of FEMA[2].

    
    
        "I’m a bit of a prepper. I probably have some materials and views
        that could get me seriously put on a watch list."
    

This person sounds like a raging narcissist. In fact, everyone in this article
does.

    
    
        I ask Campbell if he fears the kind of lawlessness seen in post-
        Katrina New Orleans or the riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
    

Again the comparison of the middle class (ostensibly white) narcissistic
"preppers" with African-Americans in poverty-stricken areas.

    
    
        Preppers emphasize certain threats and ignore others to “craft
        a scenario where their preparations can be seen as both necessary
        and sufficient.”
    

Raging narcissists.

Anyway, you could say that these people aren't doing any harm to anyone or
anything besides their own bank accounts, but I disagree with that. Between
fostering a greater sense of paranoia and distrust between them and their
neighbors, helping them double down on a "I've got mine, so fuck you"
attitude, and inspiring them to vote for fringe candidates who not only agree
with them, but _actively want to see the apocalypse happen_ [3], I'd say these
people are doing real harm to the fabric of society.

[1]
[http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/katrina/Lan...](http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/katrina/Landphair.html)

[2]
[http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/03/brown.fema.emails/](http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/03/brown.fema.emails/)

[3] [http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Michele-Bachmann-Barack-
Oba...](http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Michele-Bachmann-Barack-Obama-Iran-
Israel/2015/04/15/id/638639/)

~~~
makeitsuckless
I suspect that there is a direct connection between this phenomenon and the US
being a nation that despite all of its resources and know-how was not only
unprepared but apparently fundamentally _unwilling_ to handle a disaster like
Hurricane Katrina.

(Americans have apparently already forgotten, or maybe never even realised,
what an enormous international embarrassment that was.)

~~~
greedo
Sure. Just like France, despite all of its resources and know how has a
heatwave in 2003 that kills over 14 thousand people. Europeans have apparently
already forgotten, or maybe never even realized, what an enormous
embarrassment that was for a "modern" country in the 21st Century.

~~~
FireBeyond
It's a little more complex than that.

The French (European) heatwave had a lot of long held social and family
structures that contributed to it, from a tendency of the elderly to live by
themselves, often disconnected to one degree or another from family, most of
the country was in 'holiday' mode in August, and other things.

The embarrassing thing about Katrina wasn't that it happened (though the
flooding was preventable), or the deaths.

It was that -the agency specifically designed to deal with the AFTERMATH, and
given billions of dollars to do so- was so spectacularly incompetent, from the
top down (Michael "Heck of a Job" Brown, a lawyer friend of Bush's put in
charge of FEMA who by the time of Katrina had no more emergency management
experience than the NIMS course you and I can take online for free), that they
actively made things worse in many cases, not better.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Then they spent billions on loans to rebuild - and no rebuilding was done, and
nobody paid back the loans.

------
netcan
Preppers. Zombie Movies and our love of apocalypse is fascinating. Repping is
similar in some ways to Cosplay, I think. It's a hobby intertwined with the
way our fantasy obsessed minds work. It enables people to keep engaging with
their fantasies. In this case, the weirdly persistent apocalypse fantasy.

When I was about 14-15, I loved Stephen King's "The Stand" and some of my
friends liked it too. The youth fetish culture didn't really exist in that
time and place, but the book and its post apocalypse world fascinated us. We
talked out what we'd do and how. Find an island. Rescue damsels. Train dogs.

It's a persistent sort of a fascination. Interestingly so. It would be fun to
find out more about the art history of zombie apocalypses.

Under this, in some way, is the fact that major catastrophes and cultural
"rebooting" plays a pretty substantial role in human history. I find the idea
that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood
events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones.
There are some pretty interesting suggestions that the early fertile crescent
civilizations' (eg Egypt) sudden rise are actually rebuilding events following
the catastrophic demise of earlier (EG Gobleki Tepeh in Turkey) civilizations.
There's also a lot of genetic evidence of major population collapses at
several points.

There's also post war baby booms and some other bits and pieces suggesting
that we are hard wired to think apocalyptically.

Interesting stuff.

~~~
declan
As you say, apocalyptic thinking seems to be deeply wired into the human
psyche.

If your threat model predicts a high probability of nuclear war, civilization-
threatening pandemics, or other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios, you
should probably move to a defensible rural homestead with solar panels, a long
growing season, and a fresh water supply -- that's an hour away from the
nearest interstate. I hear the intermountain west is nice this time of year.

What's interesting is that few prepper/survivalist discussions -- that I've
seen, maybe I'm missing them -- mention the _opportunity costs_ of moving to
the backwoods. I interviewed Y2K prepper/survivalists who quit their jobs and
followed approximately the above advice. The problem arises when the collapse,
well, doesn't happen. And you're two hours (in the summer) and six hours (in
the winter) from the nearest emergency room.

Also once you sell that city condo or suburban house and move to your self-
sufficient rural homestead, you then have a strong incentive to predict the
collapse is coming. Maybe it's not going to be Y2K after all, but how about
suitcase nukes in big cities? Or bioterror? Etc. There's also a subset of
religious survivalists who seem to want an ungodly and immoral secular society
to meet its doom; I wrote about this for Wired here:
[http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/1719...](http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/17193)

~~~
anigbrowl
There seems to be a very high overlap between the prepper 'community' (I
hesitate to use the term about such self-avowed rugged individualists) and
those who anticipate a race war, war with Islam, or some similarly
catastrophic political event. There are many people who still have a chip on
their shoulder about the civil war, and seem to yearn for a different social
order.

~~~
alphapapa
> a race war, war with Islam, or some similarly catastrophic political event.

At least one of those is, essentially, already in-progress. At least one of
those is, essentially, a farce.

Determining which is which is left as an exercise for the reader.

------
pjc50
Preppers are very culturally specific. Pretty much unheard of in the UK. Our
cultural response to the possibility of disaster is "blitz spirit"; everybody
pretends it's WW2 for a bit and that fellow citizens and civil authorities
will band together to sort it out.

There are undoubtedly people with a few weeks' supply of food, but that would
be because they live in remote areas or islands and may suffer weather related
disruption.

The American prepper rarely says it, but seems to be afraid of civil
breakdown, perhaps in the form of some race war.

~~~
andrewflnr
Well, yeah, America is a country where one allegedly unjust killing by a cop
results in looting and nationwide rioting. That's not conducive to trust in
ones neighbors. That said, I think in most cases where it really hits the fan,
people help each other out.

~~~
yongjik
I think you got your first sentence backwards. Among nations of (loosely)
similar GNP per capita, America is the only country I know of where a cop
killing a citizen in broad daylight doesn't even make news because it happens
every day.

~~~
andrewflnr
Which doesn't really detract from my point: no matter how you want to slice
the causation, it's not an environment conducive to trust.

------
xenophonf
How does anyone practice for the end of the world? Putting in time at the
shooting range isn't enough, and just fishing or gardening for fun can be very
challenging. I cannot imagine starting a farm in the middle of the apocalypse
without at least a few years experience of preparing the land, planting,
cultivation, and harvesting---and once you've brought in a harvest, you have
to figure out how to preserve it. Having all the seeds, fertilizer, water,
gear, and books in the world but none of the relevant experience seems like a
good way to starve to death. Never mind the fact that the guy who lives in
Downers Grove (a humorously apt name given his expectations) is going to be in
for a world of hurt when Chicago gets nuked:

[http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=41.87811...](http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=41.8781136&lng=-87.6297982&hob_opt=1&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=17519&crater=1&casualties=1&humanitarian=1&fallout=1&ff=50&psi=200,20,5&therm=_3rd-100,_3rd-50,_2nd-50,_1st-50&zm=10)

~~~
smacktoward
Yeah, the suburbs seem like the worst possible place to build your doomsday
fortress: too close to lots of people to avoid notice, too far from the kinds
of places you'd want to scavenge from...

------
wiredfool
He has 25 pounds of meat in the freezer. Leaving aside the whole problem of
keeping stuff frozen when the electrical system goes off, That's just not that
much. If you live in a semi rural area, buying a partial animal (or whole for
those with big freezers) is cheap and effective.

A 1/4 cow will get you that much in ground beef alone, plus the steaks and
roasts and stuff. I think the last one I got was 100+ lbs. Half a pig is
60-100lbs. Either of these will fit in a small chest freezer with room to
spare.

Hell, we bought 25 lbs of salmon last year from a guy who goes to Alaska in
the summers to fish.

~~~
pingswept
Seems like if you rounded up to integer values of animals, the maintenance of
the animals could be even cheaper, especially with the need for a freezer
obviated. For integers >= 2, the animals may even display non-zero growth
rates.

~~~
wiredfool
Umm. Sorta kinda. Freezers are easy. Frankly solar + batteries or propane
powering a freezer would be more cost effective and less time consuming than
raising the animals. Most hobby sized farms need significant inputs, like
grain or hay. If you aim for enough land for pasture/forage, there's still
going to be times of the year when you'll either need to have harvested likely
requiring fuel/machinery) or bring in inputs.

Chickens, the most cost, effort, and space effective food animals need about
.1lb/day of grain, in addition to forage and kitchen scraps. For that, you'll
get eggs and occasionally, chicks. FWIW, I've had chickens for 5 years, and
the first chick hatched yesterday. If you've got young hens, you might get .75
egg/day/hen. As they age, that goes down. All in costs are probably
O($0.50)/egg.

~~~
wang_li
But when the amount of eggs per chicken goes down, the amount of roasted
chicken goes up. :)

~~~
wiredfool
Again, Sorta. More likely that you're looking at boiling or stock than a
roaster, since the older working birds will be leaner, smaller, and tougher.
Most meat birds live a very short, overfed life where they're raised from
birth to slaughter in 10 weeks or so, leaving a 5lb(ish) carcass after
cleaning.

Laying hens will start laying after 4-6 months, then be productive for another
year, and start to tail off for the next year or two. They're 3-4lb birds
before cleaning.

On the gripping hand, there is the excess rooster problem, commonly solved
with coq au vin.

------
astrodust
Like people who buy tools in the hopes that it will make them better at some
particular craft, these "preppers" seem to think having a home fortress, guns,
and a large amount of supplies is going to help them when disaster strikes.

The only thing that helps in that situation is being highly resourceful,
adaptable, and having survival training. I'm sure an SAS-trained individual
with more more than a pair of underpants would hold up a lot better than one
of these families that, due to circumstances beyond their control, can't
access their cache.

~~~
maratd
> The only thing that helps in that situation is being highly resourceful,
> adaptable, and having survival training.

Uhhhhh ... NO.

The only thing that helps in that situation is a plane ticket to somewhere
else. People die because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. We
don't have time travel yet, but we can sure as hell get out of dodge.

~~~
astrodust
Consider: All the plane tickets in the world wouldn't get you out of a place
that gets turned into the next Palestine. That airport isn't sending anyone
anywhere any time soon.

If you've got foresight then you have options.

~~~
maratd
Well obviously waiting until the last minute until things turn to shit is
profoundly stupid.

Anyway, I wasn't necessarily restricting you to air travel. Take a boat. Or a
car. Or walk on your own two feet.

When things turn to shit, people get out. They don't go into their bunkers
with their canned food. That's stupid.

------
ahelwer
On the tamer side of things, general disaster preparedness is smart. FEMA has
a pretty good website[1] dedicated to the topic.

I'm probably not alone in saying my emergency supply consists of a bunch of
uneaten Soylent sitting neglected in a low cupboard. I also live in Seattle,
where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are a real threat. So really, I ought
to start taking my own advice here.

[1] - [http://www.ready.gov/are-you-ready-guide](http://www.ready.gov/are-you-
ready-guide)

------
stevenmays
In general, this is a waste of resources. There is a very low statistical
chance of an apocalypse event occurring.

I agree with general disaster preparedness. You should have a few weeks worth
of water/food, and a flash light on hand in case of a natural disaster.

MMM on preppers: [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/03/03/why-we-are-not-
rea...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/03/03/why-we-are-not-really-all-
doomed/)

~~~
wyager
> There is a very low statistical chance of an apocalypse event occurring.

And some people assign a large enough negative utility to dying in an
emergency that it makes sense for them to spend a substantial amount of money
preparing for an emergency.

~~~
stevenmays
Yes, there is a negative utility on death. But if you spent 50% of your extra
money and time on preparing for something that has a 1% chance of happening
statistically you will lose. Not only the resources outlayed, but the
opportunity cost associated with them.

~~~
wyager
That's not how it works. It's not rational to allocate resources to preparing
for possible outcomes depending solely on the chance of that outcome
happening. For example, there is maybe a ninety percent chance that I will get
a splinter over the next year, but I don't allocate ninety percent of my
resources preparing for this eventuality.

One rationally allocates resources so as to maximize expected utility; if an
emergency has a very high negative utility, and an agent believes they can
substantially minimize the utility loss by preparing thoroughly, it may work
out for them to spend a fair amount of money preparing for a hypothetical
emergency.

------
justaman
Economic collapse? Requiring barrels of cash to buy an apple? Simply put...
No.

[http://www.pssurvival.com/](http://www.pssurvival.com/)

------
technofiend
I plan to make my money in the post-apocalypse selling maps to preppers'
homes. Just give me 5% of their cache and we're good.

~~~
crpatino
That's funny, but it is a real issue preppers often dismiss. If you sit on a
big cache o stuff, and have nothing else to offer for the rest of the
community, what's going to prevent them from taking it away from you.

Though I suspect that in any sort of emergency where the scenario resembles
TEOTWAWKI, SHTF, etc, a big proportion of the robbing bands will be preppers
who find out the hard way that the only thing in the stash that works as
expected is the assault rifle.

~~~
alphapapa
And then they run out of ammo. Or catch a stray bullet. Or get stabbed in the
back. (Hey, if you're with a bunch of people willing to do violence to others,
who's to say one of them won't do it to you?)

------
notwhereyouare
There was a show on discovery for a while that followed some preppers. Watched
the first season. Some of the stuff that the people did was cool, but some of
the other things was a little out there for me

