Fiscal Cliff: Preppers Don’t Look So Crazy After All

By Kerry Patton
Clash Daily Guest Contributor

Now that America’s most elite buffoons passed a bill dealing with our fiscal skydive, reality must kick in. Tax cuts aren’t “cuts”, rather increases. Debt reduction is actually expansion. A fiscal cliff was not averted one bit. In fact, the cliff just grew much larger. America’s economic woes have not only gone unresolved, they have actually expanded.

A very simple understanding of “less means more” must be fundamentally grasped in today’s American society. Characteristics of greed, self-centeredness, and lack of discipline are finally catching up to us. A national cataclysmic event is looming so ask yourself, can you survive any forecasted meltdown?

Last week, a good friend e-mailed me. He was at the Dulles Gun Show —- a three day event which started on the 28th of December. Alarming, he informed “there was no AR-15 inventory at all. Approximately 2.5 million AR’s were sold last week.” Americans are starting to wake up and purchase firearms. Some Americans are starting to prepare for disaster.

How many Americans can effectively utilize those firearms? How many Americans understand without a good ammunition supply, those weapons are worthless? I am all for personal physical security, I own plenty of weapons, but physical security through weapon defense is no longer good enough.

What will Americans do if the US power grid gets shut down? How many remember the Northeast Blackout of 2003? For most affected, the blackout lasted just one day however 45 million Americans were affected and eleven people died.

Systems such as transportation, communications, water, sewer, industry, and of course individual power generation were temporarily crippled due to the Northeast Blackout of 2003. How many more people would have been killed if grand scale power outages lasted more than a week, a month, or longer? Look at what happened during Hurricane Sandy.

Could the ongoing fiscal skydive lead to a nationwide crisis such as power loss? Could the price of energy and or gas get so high the average American can no longer afford such commodities? Do Americans know how to survive without energy? How will you cook, procure water, stay warm, prevent disease through proper sanitation, escape to other locations? How will you sustain?

I am no doomsday prepper. I have watched Doomsday Preppers on the television and often laughed. A grade is given to those on the show and almost every one of them gets a failing grade in one of the graded categories. Unfortunately, security is a system of systems approach which means if one aspect of your overall security plan fails, everything else has the potential to crumble.

Why do most of these preppers receive a failing grade? A million reasons exist but the truth is this. Even they fail to grasp the concept that less is more. Most Doomsday Preppers simply have too much of one thing and not enough of the other, the other being knowledge.

Too many tools of dependency and not enough practical know-how have proven to be one of America’s greatest demons. You can have all the matches in the world and eventually you will spark enough flame to light a fire, but how long will those matches last? You can have the greatest high tech water purifiers in the world but eventually the filters will grow old and no longer do their job. You can have all the seeds in the world but how will you grow a garden during a drought?

There was a time in our country when citizens knew how to survive off the land. There was a time when we knew how to not only hunt for food but we also knew how to butcher it ourselves. There was a time when children were taught valuable survival skills yet most kids today couldn’t last a week in the woods. There was a time when Americans knew how to read a map and successfully journey on foot from one point to another without getting lost.

We as a nation are completely lost. We have lost our identity, understanding, and preservation. We have grown dependent on big government and wasteful spending. We have verbally acknowledged our distaste for these things yet we continue down the same road by continuously re-electing machine politicians even though they have a below average approval rating. We have gone insane.

As insane as we have become, most frightening is the mass population having true dependency on a very large and corrupt system that will eventually cripple the United States. We can no longer do the things needed to survive as individuals simply because we lost the knowledge to do such things or because too many roadblocks interfere with our own right to self-preservation. Preppers don’t look so crazy after all.

Image: Old Bill Williams/Williams, AZ; www.mountainmanbronzes.com; author: Bill Pettit; public domain

Kerry Patton, a combat disabled veteran, is the author of Contracted: America’s Secret Warriors (Quiet Owl Books). You can follow him on Facebook or at kerry-patton.com.