Hmm..wanting to be safe and secure isn’t just a white guy thing. Who knew?

LONGMONT, Colorado — Brook Morgan surveyed booths at the “Survival & Prepper Show” in Colorado that were stocked with boxes of ammunition, mounds of trauma medical kits, and every type of knife imaginable.

A self-described “30-year-old lesbian from Indiana,” Morgan is one of a new breed of Americans getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists since the 1980s.

No article about POC (preppers of color) would complete without dialing up the wayback machine to this article about NYC survivalists, and a profile of Aton Edwards who was, at the time, promoting himself as a survivalist. As far as I can tell, that might have been the first media representation of a black survivalist.

Over the years, I’ve met a bunch of survivalists…one of my best friends for a number of years was a gay survivalist. I have another acquaintance who is an Asian survivalist. I also know a Jewish survivalist and at least one somewhat lefty survivalist. I’m less concerned about what you are than I am about who you are.

Interestingly, I dont know any black survivalists but thats mostly because I live in a pretty homogenous place. However, if I met one I wouldn’t have any problem being their friend, assuming we got along on stuff. As a wise man once said, “Racism is a silly philosophy. If you take the time to know someone…really get to know them….you can find a much better reason to hate them.”

A cynic might say “Yeah, got a survivalist buddy who is black/Hispanic/Middle Eastern…that way when the balloon goes up you can have an in with whatever ethnic militia winds up running the show.

Somehow, I don’t think it’ll come to that. But…I’ve been wrong.

If someone wants to take responsibility for their well being, and step up to take care of their loved ones without demanding ‘government should do something’, then we’re probably going to be friends..I don’t care what your melanin count is.

I should also mention I have met survivalists of a much more…unfriendly…type. I used to work with a guy who identified as a white nationalist. Nice enough guy but I would probably keep my distance in a world without 911. Met another guy who said that after the bombs dropped it would be open season on atheists because their lack of religion meant they had no morals to keep them from raping and killing and were therefore a threat to everyone. And, of course, we’ve all met the survivalists whose entire plan for rising out the apocalypse is to simply to take by force from other people (cough*GunKid*cough).

I, for one, welcome anyone into the fold of survivalism who wants the same things I want: safety, security, and liberty.

Probably nothing you didn’t already know, but still worth a read.

One basic rule of life is that everything is easy with the proper tools, and nearly impossible without them. A great example of how this works is the can opener: Although we’ve had the pull-tab design since 1962, you can still somehow find plenty of canned goods on the grocery shelves that lack this simple advancement—and if you have one and lack a can opener, you will quickly learn the definition of futility.

I have opened cans with a knife before…it isn’t fun, but it isn’t terribly difficult either. I have not tried the spoon method yet. If you’re a survivalist of any stripe, you always have a knife handy even if you dont have a can opener or multitool on you. And, yes, a P38 works well and takes up no space on your keychain.

My experience is that the can openers on a Swiss Army knife or multitool do excellent jobs and have the bonus of being part of a larger ‘multitasker’…in other words, a multitool with a can opener is more useful than a can opener by itself.

By the way, when it comes to #10 cans of food for storage, I always tape a P38 to the bottom of every second or third can. Theyre cheap, small, and a far better choice than banging a screwdriver with a rock.

You know how bridal shops and wedding related businesses make so much money? They do it by catering (so to speak) to a dream or fantasy. Brides have this notion in their head of ‘their special day’ and how they want it exactly a particular way. As a result, when there is suddenly an extra $600 charge for flowers that wasn’t there in the initial budget..well….it’s okay because everything has to be ‘perfect’.

Before any Gyno-Americans accuse me of sexism, there’s a similar costs-be-damned fantasy world that strikes Penile-Americans as well. Case in point, this fascinating article about something I’ve commented on before – the opportunists who (supposedly) build ‘retreats’ and sell ‘memberships’ to people who want to ride out Ragnarok without having to do the heavy lifting themselves:

Barrett Moore had ordered 2 million N95 masks, held enough freeze-dried food to feed families hiding from global Armageddon for decades, owned a small arsenal of guns, and fortified a pole barn in which to wait out the collapse of civilization. But he had something no one else could buy: knowledge that the end was coming and that the supply chains would snap; the best hope your family had was holing up in his northern Michigan compound while things fell apart. The price for this service would run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to be paid in installments.

This is a fascinating article that encapsulates everything I’ve seen in the last twenty years or so in regards to ‘membership’ survival retreats…big promises, big names, big money, big ideas, big disappointments, and big embarrassment .

Here’s something to think about – if you’re going to be a member of a ‘survival group’ or organization, membership should be based on something other than money – race, religion, political leaning, ethnicity, familial relation, shared history, etc, etc. If the only membership requirement to get in is to write a check, then in my opinion you are making a mistake.

Whether you know it or not, you’re probably already part of a very informal survival group. You, your spouse, your neighbor who you go shooting with, the guy at work you share books about prepping with, the brother in law who splits a beef with you once a year….shutdown the power grid, roll those people together, and you’ve pretty much got your own ad-hoc ‘survival group’ that would probably be a lot more cohesive than a half dozen families whose only common denominator was the ability to write a check.

Anyway… it’s an interesting read and, really, you should see the red flags a mile away. But, like the bride who justifies every ridiculous extra expense because its ‘her special day’, a lot of people bought a ticket to a ride like this because it catered to their end-of-the-world ‘fantasies’. The moral of the story here is, I think, thatif you really, genuinely believe in your particular version of the end of the world to the point you’d give a con man a million bucks, then you should have been smart enough to realize you’d have been better off spending that million on your own, personal, private version of that commercial retreat.

Here’s an interesting question for you. Imagine you have a room full of people. In the middle of the length of one wall there is an emergency exit. Call an emergency and have everyone try to leave as quickly as possible through the exit. Time/count the amount of people that make it through the exit. Now repeat the same experiment, but put an obstruction in front of the emergency exit..like a stanchion or room divider. Do you wind up with more or less people exiting quickly? Surprisingly…more.

Shiwakoti experimented with different exit scenarios using square petri dishes that had exits located in the middle of a side and in the corner. Shiwakoti found that an exit located in the middle of the wall with no obstacles in front of it was the least efficient set up. He measured the efficiency of an exit by the amount of time it took the ants to get through it. On average, it took 50 ants 18 seconds to get through an unobstructed mid-side exit. Adding a column in front of the mid-side exit reduced that time to 14 seconds. A corner exit with a column in front had an escape time of less than 11 seconds. But the best escape time was achieved with a corner exit without a column in front—less than 9.5 seconds.

A very interesting article. TL;DR version…if you ‘obstruct’ the exit somehow, you reduce the number of avenues of approach which reduces congestion at the exit. You ‘funnel’ traffic more effectively.

I bring this up because, first of all it is fascinatingly counterintuitive, but also because I was thinking about the little habits we get into as survivalists (or, arguably, the little habits we should get into) and the one that I was reminded of was that whenever you enter any space (a building, a fenced area, a room, a theater, a mall, a bus, etc) one of the first things you should do is look for the alternate ways to get out of there other than the way you just came in. Most people do not do this. This means that when someone yells ‘fire’ in that crowded theater, 99% of the people are gonna run to where they came in….you, on the other hand, will head to the exit that is being virtually ignored. Which brought me to another interesting bit of data about emergency exits. Quick: what color is the exit sign? Red, right? Thats what we usually see. But in virtually everywhere else but North America exit signs are green. Why? Because almost universally red means ‘stop’ or ‘danger’, and green means ‘safe’ or ‘go’. So when you are engaged in looking for the exit sign, you have to be cognizant of the fact the exit could be green or red.

Another little known fact, but one that makes epic sense if you think about it: emergency doors must open outwards…and any entrance/exit that uses a revolving door must be flanked by conventional doors. Think about it…a crowd of panicked people surging against an exit door means if you had to pull it open, you’d die. And a revolving door is 50/50 even when there isn’t a panic. Where did these rules come from? Bad times in history.

A fascinating little rabbit hole I wound up in today as I was thinking about remembering to be more diligent about checking out where the exits are.