My reason to prepare
Prepper Outreach Contest Submission #6:
The reason I prep is approximately 26 inches long and weighs about 13 ½ pounds. When I walk into the room, it lights up when she smiles at me and is terribly excited to see me. It is my job to make sure that she has love, shelter, food, clothing, and the other necessities of life. Very few people would think that it is unreasonable for me to start a college fund for her at this age and I consider this just another form of prepping.
During my fifty-four years living in Tennessee, I have experienced three major ice storms. My wife has lived through three major hurricanes while living in Florida. Each of these knocked out the local power grid for more than a week. Having lived through the situations at different points in our lives, we have developed an appreciation of how fragile our ultra-comfortable lives actually are. Ice storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, severe droughts, and a myriad of other natural disasters occur every year across the world. At some time, either we or someone we know will be affected at least locally by these inevitable events.
Other common events that can drastically affect our lives are those that financially impede the lives of our families such as loss of a job, poor investments, recessions, depressions, runaway inflation. I have lived through each of these; remember the interest rates in the 1980s when 12.5% was a great rate for an FHA loan. In November 2011, one month after the reason I prep was born, I had my third major heart attack, resulting in enough damage to make it impossible for me to continue working. Currently, I am trying to get Social Security Disability benefits, a process that can last from 4 months to 4 years. The financial impact on my family has been horrendous, but we have provisions to weather the storm. This type of situation can happen to anyone at any time.
Having lived through the Cold War era with safety based on having enough nuclear weapons to ensure Mutually Assured Destruction of most of the planet, I still remember the Bay of Pigs and the world on the brink of implementing M.A.D. Granted that nuclear exchange between superpowers is now a much less likely scenario, it has been supplanted by concerns that terrorists will gain access to nuclear weapons and use them to attack our civilization. The other main fear is that a rogue nation will use nuclear weapons to instigate an EMP attack upon the US, effectively destroying the energy grid. The likelihood that I would survive such a scenario, given my health conditions, is minimal, but the main reason that I prep is to increase the chances that my family will have to survive when I am no longer here.
R.A. TN
2 Comments
Sandy Taylor · April 21, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Short and sweet but your point is well made. For me as well, prepping is about taking care of my family. It’s not just about having food stored away, knowing how to garden or how to suture or how to protect it all, but down to the everyday things too, like having a will and trying to leave a free and clear property for the children. They are why we do this. Mine is about 26″ right now too. 🙂
~ Sandy Taylor
Ricky Allen · April 27, 2012 at 4:11 am
They do keep us going!
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