So two people figured that they had maxed out their preparedness level, according to the last poll I posted. Interesting. The majority of respondents put themselves at a very middle-of-the-road five. A couple people threw in a zero. As I said, I figure I’m about a seven.

It’s a little misleading though…we don’t have a standardized benchmark for what constitutes readiness. You may think a years worth of food is your goal, and someone elses goal would be six months. But..it’s not a competition..the only person whose opinion really matters on this sort of thing is your own. I suspect the perfect level of preparedness is like achieving the speed of light – you can get to 99.999999999999% there but you’ll never get to that 100%.

Biggest bottlenecks? Again, it differs from person to person. My experience in talking with other survivalists is that there are really usually only three things that hold them back:

• Money
• Family
• Job

Money is the one that holds me back. If I could shake loose an extra couple thousand bucks a month I’d get a lot off stuff crossed of my list. But…it’s hard to make that kinda money out here in the flyover states. I already exist on a pretty tight budget, and while my income is definitely going up it’s still well below the national average.

Many, many people I talk to say that their big bottleneck is family. Why are you still living in San Francisco, I ask? “Oh, I want to move to Wyoming but my wife doesn’t want to leave because the grandkids are here”….I’ve heard that one a bunch. Or they feel they have to be near an elderly relative. Or the kids are in school for another X amount of years. So, they do the best they can where they are.

Finally, the job angle. This is the same as the family angle except the focus is the career rather than the family. It’s hard to walk away from being a gas/oil lease attorney in Houston making a zillion bucks a year and become a small-town lawyer in Thermopolis or Pahrump doing water-rights law for inbred farm communities.

On the other hand, I have met survivalists who conquered this sort of thing in the simplest and most arduous way possible – they took a deep breath and jumped into a 3-5 year plan of working their asses off in big cities like Chicago, LA, or New York, saved every dime they could, put together a nest egg that would let them live elsewhere, and then took the money and ran.

He’s dead now, so I can talk about him….I used to know a machinist down the valley here. He came out in the 70’s fell in love with Montana and knew this was his future. He went back to his aerospace job in California and worked like a dog for four years until he had enough money to bail. He came out here, bought about 60 or so acres, built his house and machine shop, and moved out here for good. He brought enough money from his California indenture to pay for the land up front, build his place, set it up, and have some money in the bank to cover him while he got his new machining gig set up. Being a gunnie at heart, he wound up selling a chunk of the property to create the local shooting range. So..you guys who go shooting in Hamilton at the Whittecar range, your local friendly neighborhood survivalist sold ’em that property.

Much more rarely I’ll meet people who simply had some sort of moment where they just packed it up and moved with a lot less planning than that. Someone has a really bad day at the cube farm, gets stuck in traffic on the way home, comes home to find neighborhoodlums on the lawn, gets woken up by sirens and urban noise, and says “Screw this, lets sell this place and move to Idaho”. Which, actually, often works better than you think since the house you sell in LA or Sacramento will fetch enough to buy you the same size house out here for about 1/2 the money….leaving you the other half to stake yourself.

As I said, my bottleneck is cash. But, Im lucky in that money is not finite. You can always get or make more. It’s time that becomes scarce. My math says I’ve only got maybe ten or fifteen productive years in front of me, so it’s balls to the wall in terms of trying to get money put away and stuff acquired.

What bout you, man? What’s keeping you from pegging the needle on the HowPreppedAmI-o-meter?

There are little hallmarks that occur in life that let you  know, for better or worse, that you’ve transitioned to a new stage in your life… having to wear a tie or body armour, for example. Todays sign that my life has gotten more complicated than it used to be: I had to buy a matching pair of monitors so I can dual-wield programs.

On the bright side, if I get back into gaming these will be fabulously useful.

I dunno about you, but sometimes I think there’s never a level at which I’m satisfied. Me, I’d say Im a 7. But…lets put it to a vote:

[yop_poll id=”3″]

But, we happy survivalists being a rather independent bunch, my definition of prepared may not be the same as your definition of prepared. But, for me, I’d say I’m an easy seven…prepared enough to outlast a majority of the population, but not so prepared that I won’t worry when the bombs go off.

Those were some interesting numbers from that poll. Apparently, the majority of respondents share the same thought as I – that the ‘Big Event’ will be economic. Not zombies, not the Rapture, not Planet X, not chemtrails….just a good ol’ fashioned economic crisis.

Of course, no one really knows what the next apocalypse is going to look like, so I’d rather err on the side of ‘overprepared for an economic collapse’ so I don’t wind up ‘underprepared for WW3’. Succinctly, if you’re prepared for a nuclear war you are probably, de facto, prepared for all the smaller stuff than that….blizzards, power outages, etc.

I have had an interest in preparedness (although I didn’t know thats what it was) since my early teens. (Directly traceable, I believe, to having started reading post-apocalyptic fiction for some extra credit book reports)  It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I could do anything about it. And, being a young stupid kid, my immersion into preparedness was pretty much the same as most n00bs – lotsa guns. In the painful decades since then, I’ve moved away from the fun stuff like guns and camo to the mundane stuff like food and toilet paper. Don’t misunderstand…both are needed for a well-balanced approach to preparedness….but in all the crises I’ve been in , we used alot more food and TP than we did M855.

I was emailing someone the other day and I mentioned that there’s a point where you can ‘plateau’ as a survivalist and your focus goes from acquisitions to maintenance. Your’e pretty much done acquiring things and you’re now at the stage of maintaining those things. Preparedness is a commitment, man….sure, there are some things you can tuck away and forget about, but there’s alot that needs to be maintained and taken care of on a regular basis if you want to not waste your money. (For example, running the generator once a month to make sure it’s always ready.) I wouldn’t say I’ve plateaued… there are still a few big ticket items I need to acquire, but if the world ended tomorrow I would not feel at a great disadvantage with what I have now. But…always room for improvement, y’know?

The things that hold me back? Easy: money and motivation. (and, really, the two kinda go hand in hand.) If money were no object, I’d be living in my own private county right now. But my motivation wanes from time to time and without motivation I’m less inclined to take the steps and do things necessary to get the money. Frankly, it’s always easier to do nothing than it is to do something…and I’m sadly notorious for taking the easy way.

This is probably the main reason I so enjoy disaster movies and books – it puts my overactive imagination into overdrive and I start wargaming things in my head…and next thing you know I’m in the attic with a clipboard inventorying Hardigg cases and making lists. Hey, whatever gives you motivation. Me, my motivational imperative has always been security. Not physical security, per se, but rather security as in being able to absorb the punches that life likes to aim at my family jewels. My goal is to be secure enough that a job loss, debilitating injury, or other insult to my well-being will be an inconvenience rather than a critical hit. To that end…survivalism.

Something new to play with, blogwise………

[yop_poll id=”2″]

I’ve apparently reached a stage in my existence where my standard uniform of jeans and a t-shirt is not always the perfect ensemble. But…it’s ridiculous to pay retail for clothes I don’t even want to wear unless I have to. So…yay for used clothing. Got four shirts and a wool sweater for $24. That frees up more money for ammo.

Speaking of ammo, the big event at the moment seems to be YouTube doing some ethnic cleansing in the continuing culture war. I think it’s absurd, but I’m not sure they don’t have the right to say whom they’ll host or not. I’m reminded of the last great gun culture war back in the late ’80s/early 90’s…back when gun owners were urged to buy shares of TimeWarner to try and influence their trajectory. That didn’t work either.

But, make no mistake, it is a culture war. Guns are the convenient excuse to get everyone on board but invariably the gun community tends to trend towards the right side of the political spectrum and the real issue is about quelling those voices from the right, guns is just the convenient rally cry to muster the troops. Kinda like how the Civil War was ostensibly fought over slavery but was really about something else.

How do you play defense and win at a culture war? I’m not sure you can. You can not lose, though… which is almost as good as a win. You not-lose by dragging out the issue until the other side gets tired/bored/distracted or loses support. (Same technique used in Algeria, Vietnam, Korea, Colonial America, Colonial Africa, Colonial everywhere.)

Eventually the Tide-Pod-eaters who we can’t trust to cross a street safely will  move back towards video games, sex, cars, and spring break. As a political bloc they are virtually worthless for anything except media fodder. A 10/22, a brick of ammo, and a Saturday afternoon would probably go a long way towards encouraging them to think for themselves. Something more about the fun of shooting and being outdoors rather then about political indoctrination (not that political indoctrination is uncalled for, just that there’s a time and place for it….an 8am Monday morning on the first day of learning to shoot is probably not it.)

In a place like Montana it’s pretty hard to find someone who is anti-gun AND has never shot a gun before. (Mostly transplanted Californians and East Coasters, I’d imagine.) I should post an ad somewhere offering to take kids shooting for free if they’ve never had the opportunity. You know there was a time when lotsa high schools used to have smallbore rifle teams. We should bring that back.

Indoor shooting practice at school back in the day. High school shooting teams were not rare and these kids didn’t grow up to be mass murderers.

Local Missoula Junior Varsity Indoor RPG Team. State champs last year……