Are You Prepared?

I’ve been thinking about the current state of affairs, and so I put my thoughts together and wrote to my two sons, one who lives in Colorado and the other in Tennessee.

To my sons,

I’m not the paranoid type, but I do like being prepared. I’ve wasted a lot of time, energy, and money over the years preparing for the worst and worst never came, thankfully.

But I’ve never seen the world like it is today. Empty, or at least sparse, store shelves, The price of gas is higher than it was back when I was younger than you guys in the 1970s when there were blocks-long lines just to fill half a tank.

We all live in the most free, prosperous country in the history of the world. I have so much hope for your future and I want to see as much of that as I can.

That said, I’ve been preparing for the possibility of short-term social unrest and possible violence that happens when people are hungry. I hope you both will also be prepared for a possible short-term breakdown in what we have come to trust as “society”

To that end, I hope you will both be prepared for this eventuality. Even if we don’t have a zombie apocalypse or nuclear war, it pays to be prepared anyway. Don’t assume that you can just go down to the grocery store for tonight’s dinner.

Here’s a list of things I’ve been thinking about as far as a minimum you should have on hand in normal times. 

• Plenty of water. You can live for a couple weeks without food, but you can’t live more than a day without water. Every time I go to the supermarket, I buy a couple gallon bottles of spring water (not distilled) and store them in the basement. You’ll need at least a gallon per person per day. If your electricity goes out, ain’t no water coming from your tap. Best to have water stored.
• Food. You’ll need proteins and carbs. You don’t need to go full-prepper and get the 25-year food bins, but you should have some boxes of pasta and some canned meat to feed your family for at least a month. Rice is probably the best store of carbs and protein. Get lots of it and keep it in a cool, dry place.
• Cooking supplies. Imagine you’re on a three-month campout. What would you need to heat water, cook your grains, and make your proteins palatable. Assume the power is out, and the propane tank is empty. Oh, and the propane tanks, make sure you have a couple that are full and ready to go.
• Chickens. God’s gift to humans. Chickens are beautiful, funny, and they give you super high-quality protein. A hen will lay about one egg per day in the summer (less in the winter), so having a half dozen hens would be good for most families. You could get a single rooster in order to keep having babies, but they are often jerks to the girls and they are always loud, so neighbors might complain.
• Seeds. Whether or not you consider yourself a gardener, you may need to be. You should keep a stock of seeds. They’re cheap and, if you keep them in a cool, dry place, they’ll last for decades. Look for high-nutritious leafy vegetables like kale (yuck!) and spinach. I imagine kale is better than starving, but I’d have to be pretty close to starving to confirm that.
• Three guns. A pistol or revolver (9mm pistol and/or .38/.357 revolver) plus a good holster, because you’ll be carrying it constantly, a rifle, (AR-15 or AK-47 in .223/5.56 NATO or 7.62mm), and a shotgun. I have a nice little 20 gauge Mossberg Shockwave. The handgun is good for all-around safety. Rifle is good for long-range defense or hunting, and the shotgun is a nice close-quarters home-defense tool. And there’s nothing like the sound of racking a round in a shotgun to make someone on the other side of a door re-evaluate their life choices.
• Ammo for whatever you have. A thousand rounds of pistol ammo is a nice goal. A few hundred shotgun rounds, and a few hundred rifle rounds at minimum. That number may seem high, but you need to constantly practice with all of your firearms, so be sure to account for that.
• Books. There might be a time, temporary or long-term, where you will not have access to the marvels we’ve come to expect from an electronically interconnected world. Books printed on paper provide what they’ve done for generations before the internet: inspiration, entertainment, reference, morals. Build a small library of books on topics you think are interesting. How to fix your car. How to plant and feed a garden. How to capture water and store it. I’ve downloaded Wikipedia to have on a battery-powered device (you wouldn’t want to print it out) just in case. And you should have a copy of the Bible for grounding.
• Batteries. You should have plenty of batteries for all of your devices. If you have rechargeables, make sure you have a recharger that works without grid power (solar or human-powered).
• Tools. Two sets of wrenches and sockets (metric and imperial) should be accessible. A couple screwdrivers, a hammer, and some nails and screws are oh, so useful if you need to do repairs or fix damage done to your house by the weather or the marauding mobs. Don’t forget a flashlight.
• Stuff to trade. If you find a good deal on ammo for a gun you don’t have, grab it. You can always trade later. Same goes for almost anything that might have value to someone else. I got a great deal on a hundred pounds of cigarette tobacco. I don’t smoke cigarettes, but I could trade that for other things should the opportunity arise.
• Alternative currency. This could be redundant with the previous point, but if the dollar should become worthless, gold will still have value. Silver, too. Bitcoin might, but that depends on the state of the global communications networks. If the internet goes down, it’s possible that other networks will appear, and those networks could inherit the Bitcoin blockchain. But gold and silver will always have value. Like cigarettes. Or coffee. Or any other drug.
• Know your farmer. Create a relationship with a couple farms in the area. Support them now, and they’ll more likely be there for you later, when the stores are empty and everyone else is desperate.
• Freezer. Spend a couple hundred bucks on a chest-style freezer. You can put a lot of meat in there. If the power goes out, you won’t have freeze any more, but these things are well-insulated, so you’ll have a few weeks to eat what you’ve set aside in there.
• Bug-out bag. You both know the value of leaving quickly if necessary. From where you are, right now, reading this, you should have a bag packed with whatever it takes to get the heck out of harms way and survive for a couple days. Just think of what you might need and pack that sucker up. Food, water, perhaps a gun, knife, tape, paracord, first-aid supplies. Figure it out, and have it always at the ready. And one for your lady, too, just in case she’s not where you are when it’s necessary to bug out. Don’t forget a LifeStraw.
• Speaking of your lady. Have a meeting point pre-arranged in case you need to meet later. Assume no cell phone. In New Hampshire, we are building a radio network that is independent of the government’s cell system so that we can communicate with each other if there’s an emergency where the system fails. You probably don’t have that, so you need to establish alternative means for re-connecting if you are separated.
• Never let your gas tank get below half-full. Pain in the ass, but if you need to move in a hurry, nothing is more buzz-kill than having to stop to refill your tank, especially when everyone else is doing so. And the pumps might not work or be empty. For us in New England, this is a standard winter thing, as being stuck on the side of the road in a snow storm with no one to save you, at least you can be confident that the engine will stay running to keep you warm. Also, keep blankets in your car.
• Prescription meds. You probably won’t be able to get prescription medications for a while in the case of social unrest. So if you are dependent on something, check with your doctor to see if you can get some extra rations of the drugs you need.
• Pet food. Make sure you have enough food for your four-leggers. They can probably eat what you eat, but save that steak for yourself, kitty will be fine with pâté out of a can. This is also where an abundance of eggs is helpful.
• Paper products. Remember back in 2020 when you couldn’t find toilet paper? As you remember, in January 2020 we had nine puppies. They pooped and peed a lot and so we went through a lot of paper towels. Guess what you couldn’t get in early 2020? Toilet paper and paper towels don’t expire, so get as much as you have room to store.

These are just thoughts I’ve had over the past few days. It is not comprehensive by any means, just a list of things that might be helpful.

I’m not predicting the end of civilization here. I’m just pointing out that we should all be prepared (but not paranoid) for the worst, should it come to that, or just a temporary supply-chain disruption.

No need to get worried about Armageddon, and I’m sure you both know most of what I just covered here.

So let me know if this is helpful, or if it is just obvious and “OK, dad, we knew all this already”. Or if there’s anything I might have missed.

I mentioned a bug-out bag. Confession: I don’t have one. Our property here is our bug-out bag. We have guns and ammo, first-aid supplies, food, and equipment stored at various places on the property, so this is my 60-acre bug-out bag. You are both welcome to bug-out here with your families should the need arise. You know the address.

Love, Dad.