Preparedness Isn’t Just For Preppers
In case you hadn’t noticed, the world is a mess. The Left has successfully created so much chaos that here in America, while the “fundamental transformation” Obama promised isn’t complete, virtually everything we’ve held dear all our lives has been damaged and if we don’t arrest the metastasis, we WILL reach a point of no return.
The COVID pandemic didn’t meet the most dire predictions or result in what Preppers describe as the TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It) worst-case scenario, but it most certainly exposed many of the problems of which they have long warned. Illness, death, flaws and inadequacies in the health care system, contradicting expert opinions, supply disruptions, economic distress, societal breakdown and lawlessness were all manifest. Life as we know it for most of us may not have ended, but it certainly changed.
Add to the pandemic the impact of hurricanes, wildfires, shells and bullets flying in Ukraine, inflation that we really feel (1/2 gallon of milk and a gallon of gas above $4.00!), strikes, the Russians and North Koreans getting cozy with one another, the Chinese continuing their hegemonic aggression not just in the Spratly Islands but in Latin America, Africa and even Europe, and everything else that has increased tensions and insecurity, and things are pretty damn unstable!
The Left has infected and corrupted all our institutions: not just politics and government, but the military, education, healthcare, banks, corporations, the judiciary, sports, journalism, entertainment, agriculture (yes, even agriculture) and on and on. Just about EVERY aspect of our lives has been infected with a virus far more deadly than COVID…WOKEISM, or LEFTISM, or the euphemistic “PROGRESSIVISM” or “SOCIAL JUSTICE”.
ALL OF IT, really, reflects the age-old battle between the have’s and have not’s, between the makers and the takers, between the productive and the indolent, between people of faith and the godless, even between Mars and Venus!
Tech and the Internet have amplified/given a megaphone to a whole generation of “victims” of oppression, of racism, of corporate cronyism, “white male aggression”, repression, institutional bias, etc. giving rise to a hyper-acute and hyper-active “grievance industry.”
It’s a mess! The guardrails, the yardsticks we used to have to separate right from wrong, good from evil, are almost gone.
Against this backdrop there is one vulnerability we ALL have, one that truly could transform our society into a scene from The Walking Dead minus the zombies…
THE LOSS OF POWER.
Everything we do from morning to night is dependent on electricity.
We’ve all experienced temporary power losses in our homes. The impact ranged from minor inconvenience to life-threatening. When Isaias hit in the Eastern U.S. in 2020 it knocked out power for millions of people for as much as two weeks. If you were affected, you know how bad things were. But even if you weren’t, the anxiety, misery and even devastation caused by the storm was felt across the nation.
Natural calamities that we have absolutely no control over, (notwithstanding the nonsense spouted by the climate alarmists to the contrary), are one thing. MAN-MADE calamities, such as the cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline in May 2021, and just yesterday, the ransomware attacks on two casinos in Las Vegas, are another.
Cyber-attacks/cyber-crimes are rising at an exponential rate. So long as we can go about our daily lives unimpeded, we don’t pay attention to the war being waged in front of computer screens at all levels of government and industry. Only when there’s a blip or significant outage do we even raise an eyebrow. Even then, aside from salty words mumbled under our breaths, the refrain “they’ll figure it out” is the standard response with an expectation that the disruption will only be temporary.
But have you ever contemplated what would happen if the power went out, either from a natural disaster or a man-made one, for, say, 3 weeks? I’m not talking about TEOTWAWKI, but an outage beyond what we’ve already seen becoming more and more commonplace. What would you do? How would your life and the lives of your loved ones be affected?
The impact would range from inconvenience for those with backup generators and enough fuel to last through the crisis to catastrophe for those without electricity to heat their homes, power their well and sump pumps, refrigerators and medical devices.
Would civil unrest be a possibility? You bet it would. Could your bank account be frozen, your ATM card useless? Yup. Would grocery store shelves empty? Unquestionably.
“Grumps, you’re fearmongering” some of you may be thinking.
I urge my readers to take heed not to the grifters trying to make a dime on your insecurity (the purveyors of “72 Hour” survival kits come to mind) and not to turn their lives upside down, but to think about these questions.
The Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared” has never been more apt.
And if you’re serious about wanting to figure out how you’ll deal with emergencies beyond inconvenient and shy of TEOTWAWKI, I have a suggestion for you: get in touch with our affiliated entity: https://graybriarassociates.com.
