Honestly, I'm a little irritated by the breathless tone of the article. There's a happy medium to be had between being blithely unprepared and building a doomsday bunker stocked for the apocalypse. Building up a 30-90 day supply of essentials is neither unreasonably cautious (e.g. for a major earthquake or hurricane) nor unreasonably expensive. For those who enjoy camping, much of the gear, like camp stoves or solar lighting, can even serve a dual-purpose in the event of a disaster.
Everyone should have a little camp stove. They are great for stuff like power outages and trips across country. Saves a ton of money on eating at restaurants in the middle of nowhere that give you food poisoning.
For us to be preppers on an individual level is immensely silly- it’s on a societal level that you want to build redundancy, stability, and disaster plans. If your big plan is to defend cans of creamed corn with a sniper rifle, then your plan is to fail.
But what this minor stress shows is that we are in a broken state, with no sufficient motivational force to clean it up politically.
What this revealed is the utter lack of a functioning government we have, regardless of the political firebomb that currently runs it.
I was complaining loudly about the CDC not having an actionable ventilator plan given the SARS/MERS precursors that also needed them, but they DID have a contract/plan with an upstart company...
That got acquired by Covidien and then the bid/project was cancelled by some middle manager.
So our readiness is completely broken, and the current capitalism/accounting/budgeting/regulatory structure has no ability to stockpile/prepare.
