by monotreme1000/ February 14, 2021

As Expected

It's been about a year since the pandemic became apparent to most people. So, maybe it's time to take stock.

Many things that Preppers, especially those who participated at PFI_Forum, expected to happen, did happen. There were runs on essential goods: toilet paper, food, PPE, etc. Public health authorities tried to soothe the masses with half-truths and out right lies that put the public in danger. The government response to the pandemic was a mess. On the plus side, the strong claims made on behalf of mRNA vaccines turned out to be justified. Overall, Preppers are not sorry they prepped. Our ranks have almost certainly grown.

Lessons Learned

Our biggest failure in Flublogia was to underestimate the economic challenges inherent in a pandemic. CanadaSue had written a pandemic scenario that was in many respects on target. However, one of her action plans was to run up her credit card with last minute purchases with the expectation that the government wouldn't allow anyone to be evicted from their apartments. I don't think that would have turned out to be a good strategy in the current pandemic. The assumption that either we have no pandemic or we have an apocalyptic pandemic has turned out to be false. We did not do a good enough job at preparing for a dangerous pandemic but one in which most people would be expected to continue to pay their bills.

This has led to a two-tier society, those who can work from home and those who must risk exposure to the virus to pay their bills. We should have not missed this. When past plagues have afflicted societies, the rich left the cities to go to their country homes to live in comfort while everyone else stayed in the cities. Some educated middle-class people saved their lives by avoiding contact with others as much as possible while still living in cities. The poor and uneducated simply died. In the year 2020, nothing changed.

The New World

Predicting the future is a fool's game. I don't know whether our current vaccines will work against the new strains. I don't know whether there will be a new virus even worse than SARS-2. But as a Prepper, I want to be be prepared for these possibilities (and all other catastrophic events: Nuclear War; Grid Failure; Civil Unrest, etc.). So, how can we apply what we have learned to future plans?

Stockpiling essential goods should continue, as possible.

Look for a stable source of income not dependent on the service economy. Computer programming is one example.

Live on a Hopestead. I'm giving an optimistic name to an old name on PFI_Forum - the Doomstead which itself was a play on the Farmstead.

Small farmers with big kitchen gardens always have an advantage during a crisis. They will, at the least, have good food to eat. That is no small thing. However, when I use the term "Hopestead", I mean more than a farm. I also mean a sanctuary where people can create a small world of normalcy and perhaps not just survive, but move our civilization forward. I will write more about this in the future.

Have more children. This may sound like a strange prescription in the current year. Pretty much everything in the mass media is against having any children at all. Having a large family in the 21st century sounds almost pathological. However, I maintain that the anti-child propaganda is what is pathological, not large families.

Communities, like the Amish, which have large families are doing fine in the pandemic. Their elderly don't have to worry about where they are going to go to ride out the pandemic. Their children don't have to worry about how they are going to take care of their parents.

 At the end of the day, your boss and, as we have seen, your government isn't going to take care of you when are old or sick. The best protection against a crisis is a large family who are rooted to land that they control. I realize that most of my readers are older. But perhaps they can think about this and consider what message their children and grandchildren are receiving about child-bearing from mass media.