Article: A “secretive ‘prepping’ community

Bob - June 13, 2021

https://www.wral.com/secretive-prepping-community-growing-amid-pandemic-racial-unrest/19723456/

Good morning,

Above link tells what others are doing in re preparedness.

Regarding North Carolina, “the triangle” not necessarily referencing the famous research triangle.

Article features “Preppernet”.

Charlotte, North Carolina is not in “Hurricane Alley”.  A hot shower is dangerous during a hurricane in Hurricane Alley. A tree could be arriving at one’s dwelling wall at 50 mph. Stay dressed for evac !

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Man, he takes this seriously.  He even has a uniform with rank & title.  My uniform is jeans & pocket t-shirt.  🙂

 

Good afternoon Redneck,

What is important is that newcomers to the prepper world know how to recognize what must and must not be taken seriously. 

They also sell “survival” foods for preppers.

One of their banners at their website reads: “Food Shortage 2021 is Coming !!!”

Remember Y2K and some were even selling special tent pegs to prepare for the crash ?

 

Never seen a tobacco holster before… Funny how the people interviewing Cowboy liked it enough to put it in their article.

There are some good points in this interview

• Don’t go around yelling “I’M A PREPPER!”. They have their small knit group of 50 people, but have good op sec and aren’t announcing it to the world.
• They have a leader and are organized. Unfortunately the only thing that can come to my mind while reading this article is Cowboy is like The Governor on The Walking Dead leading his little group. Hopefully he isn’t psycho like The Governor though.
• They seem to keep a level headed approach to prepping. “Becoming an obsessed prepper … you will bankrupt yourself,” Cowboy said. “Plan for what is going to happen.” and  “Bombs, guns, and bunkers in the ground is not us,”

 

IIRC, that site has been around a while, back to the oughts anyway.

“The media” is not that different than people in general and cast a skeptical eye on anyone who doesn’t live in a style with which they are familiar. Fewer and fewer people are in any measure self-sufficient. I get the idea they are defensive of their normalcy bias, and stigmatizing people like Cowboy somewhat soothes their repressed inner prepper. Humans spent tens of thousands of years squirreling grain away and I think we can’t change those genes in a generation or two.

Prepping seems to bring out a sort of latent hostility in many people, it is as if they realize the utility of some level of self-sufficiency but seeing folks actually doing something makes them uncomfortable because they easily could do simple things to make them more resilient.

Which, in the normal scheme of things, is fine: to each his own.

I was involved in a forum back in the oughts concerned with oil depletion. A producer from CNN contacted me about coming to the Ozarks to visit our place. They weren’t interested in depletion, they just wanted some shots of the hen house and me sounding like a nutter so they might raise an editorial eyebrow and make the apartment dwellers feel superior. I declined and they did indeed make the fellow they did visit look like a tin foiler.

I’m reminded of the Twilight Zone episode where the lights went out everywhere except one house in the neighborhood. In half an hour the neighbors had convinced themselves the house with lights must either be space aliens or Commies, even though they all knew the people who lived there. IIRC they had already found a rope when the power came back on.

Moral of the story for me is to be very circumspect. I’m not hostile, I don’t fancy myself militia or typically spout military jargon like “OpSec.” I have no punji-stick tank traps behind the rhododendrons, I don’t carry normally, and I’ll help anyone I can, any time. It’s just that people being how they are, it is hard to know how even people we know well will react on a good day, impossible to know which way they’ll fly off in extremis.

Or as was a popular saying in earlier days of WWW prepper forums:

First rule of fight club:
Don’t talk about fight club

;^)

 

Good morning Pops,

Appreciated – and enjoyed – reading above.

Loved Rod Sterling’s “Twilight Zone” programs. Believe he died very young.

I see the big change from the environment of “home economics”, the Boy Scout first aid kit and Civil Defense programs to the newer “In case of emergency call 9-1-1”. Much of this is learned behavior.

Am intimately familiar with the oil depletion allowance.

“Optimismus is Feigheit.” Optimism is cowardice   Oswald Spangler