5.13.2013

Doomsday Preppers

I confess to being a prepper, of sorts.  It started when I was a Y2K consultant.  So when hearing of the Doomsday Prepper show, it sounded interesting.

A Hatfield, of the Hatfield/McCoy blood feud, stars in this show where all manner of survival skills are on display.  And it's great, as far as it goes.  But it is also funny how preparing for their perceived threats dovetails with how they already want to live their lives.

They believe that you need to live in the country, which is where they are anyway.  They believe you need your own chickens, which I can't really argue with, I love my Mom's chickens. They believe that people will kill to get at them and their supplies, which is what their family did to their neighbors for 80 years.  They practice killing people with sharpened steel scrap metal.  They develop weapons that don't require electricity.

Something tells me these Hatfields would be doing all this without the threat of terrorists overtaking the United States.  It seems they are still preparing for their neighbors from the old blood feud to come over the hill and try to kill them again.  They are just putting different labels on the threat. And, of course, immigrants.  They are also afraid of immigrants.  And they are afraid of martial law and that the government will take away their guns.  As if their homemade throwing stars would stop a drone attack.

As an aside, have any of them ever been outside of their woods?  This is one huge country.  How is a terrorist group going to take over?  How would they take over even one block in one small town?  They couldn't.  There's not a country in the world that could do that.

Can we just allow ourselves to be prepared without being insane?  It is OK to want to invent a contraption that spins in water and charges a battery just for the fun of it.  Why not?  The emotional baggage is unnecessary, along with the hate.

Below is an episode of the show.






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