Charity Is a Moral Imperative
As a Christian, I feel morally obligated to assist others who are less fortunate. Following the Old Testament laws of tzedakah (charity and tithing), I believe that my responsibility begins with my immediate family and expands in successive rings to supporting my immediate neighborhood and church, to my community, and beyond, as resources allow. My philosophy is to give until it hurts in times of disaster.
Buy Life Assurance, Not Life Insurance
Self-sufficiency and self-reliance are multifaceted. You need to systematically provide for water, food, shelter, fuel, first aid, communications, and, if need be, the tools to enforce Rule 308 (lethal force).
Exploit Force Multipliers
Night-vision gear, intrusion detection sensors, and radio-communications equipment are key force multipliers. Because these devices use high technology, they cannot be depended upon in a long-term collapse, but in the short term they can provide a big advantage. Some low technologies such as barbed wire and defensive road cables also provide advantages and can last for several decades.
Invest Your Sweat Equity
Even if some of you have a millionaire’s budget, you need to learn how to do things for yourself, and be willing to get your hands dirty. In a societal collapse, the division of labor will be reduced tremendously. Odds are that the only “skilled crafts-men” available to build a shed, mend a fence, shuck corn, repair an engine, or pitch manure will be you and your family. A by-product of sweat equity is muscle tone and proper body weight.
Choose Your Friends Wisely
Associate yourself with skilled doers, not “talkers.” Seek out people who share your outlook and morality. Living in close confines with other families is sure to cause friction, but that will be minimized if you share a common religion and norms of behavior. You can’t learn every skill yourself. Assemble a team that includes members with medical knowledge, tactical skills, electronics experience, and traditional practical skills.
There Is No Substitute for Mass
Mass stops bullets. Mass stops gamma radiation. Mass stops (or at least slows down) bad guys from entering a home and depriving its residents of life and property. Sandbags are cheap, so buy plenty of them. When planning your retreat house, think: medieval castle.
Always Have a Plan B and a Plan C
Regardless of your pet scenario and your personal grand plan of survival, you need to be flexible and adaptable. Situations and circumstances change. Always keep a Get out of Dodge (G.O.O.D.) kit handy, even if you are fortunate enough to live at your retreat year-round.
Be Frugal
I grew up in a family that still remembered both our pioneer history and the more recent lessons of the Great Depression. One of our family mottoes is: “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.”
Some Things Are Worth Fighting For
I encourage my readers to avoid trouble, most importantly via relocation to safe areas where trouble is unlikely to visit. But there may come an unavoidable day when you have to make a stand to defend your own family or your neighbors. Furthermore, if you value your liberty, then be prepared to fight for it, both for yourself and for the sake of your progeny.
The Best Defense: Live at Your Retreat Year-Round
An eleventh-hour Get Out of Dodge (G.O.O.D.) is a bad idea. Even if you have 90 percent of your gear pre-positioned at your retreat, there is the prospect of never making it there safely. Or if you arrive days or weeks late, on foot, you may find your retreat occupied by armed squatters who are gleefully eating from your carefully planned deep larder. Being forced to abandon a vehicle and travel on foot is a dicey proposition, at best. I strongly recommend that readers live at their retreats year-round—even if it means giving up a high-paying big-city job.
It is best if you can get away from urban regions fairly quickly and then take secondary or tertiary back roads. For those who are forced by circumstances or family obligations to live a long distance from their intended retreat, I recommend doing some detailed map studies and then some test-drives with a GPS receiver in hand, to establish five or more G.O.O.D. routes—some quite circuitous—to stay away from high-population regions and expected refugee lines of drift. Needless to say, always, always have enough fuel on hand to make the drive from your home to your retreat without buying any.
Depending on the fire code in your town, that might necessitate caching some fuel along your route (ideally with relatives or friends). Along with that comes the further complication of systematically rotating that cached fuel. In this regard, diesel is best, because it is much safer to store and has a much longer storage life than gasoline.
If and when The Day comes, do not hesitate. You need to get out of town well ahead of the Golden Horde, while roads are still passable. It is better to be ultracautious and run the risk of burning up some of your hard-earned vacation hours in the event of a few false alarms than to be complacent and thereby end up stuck in traffic, staring at the taillights of the linear parking lot created by the people who left town ahead of you. (Just ask the folks who tried leaving the Gulf Coast cities immediately before Hurricane Katrina arrived. It was a monumental traffic jam.)
Picking a retreat that is at least three hundred miles from a major metropolitan center and that is away from channelized areas or refugee lines of drift will drastically reduce your chances of ever having uninvited visitors.
Nothing Happens by Chance
You are holding this book in your hands for a reason. Nothing happens entirely by chance. I trust that you will soon be ready to embark on an adventure that will result not only in greater logistical preparedness but also in learning valuable skills that you can use throughout your life. These skills will build your self-confidence. When combined with acquiring the requisite tools, it will help you develop genuine self-reliance—regardless of the adversities that you might someday face. By being well prepared and well trained, you’ll also be in a position to share your skills and some of your extra supplies with less prudent relatives, neighbors, and friends.
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PRIORITIES Your List of Lists
First Things First
Survival isn’t about stuff. It is about skills. If you have time and just a bit of money, then you can get some very well-rounded training in skills that are quite applicable to post-TEOTWAWKI living. In my experience, the most cost-effective training opportunities in the United States include:
• American Red Cross first aid and CPR classes
• Local community college, park district, and adult education classes. They offer courses in metal shop, auto shop, wood shop, leather crafting, ceramics, baking, gardening, welding, and so forth.
• RWVA Appleseed rifle matches and clinics. These are held all over the nation. They offer great training for very little money.
• Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) classes and camps
• FEMA/CERT classes (classroom and Internet courses, some with team commitment)
• LDS (Mormon) cannery classes/canning sessions. Many wards have their own canneries, which are generally open to non-Mormons.
• ARRL amateur-radio classes
• Species-specific and breed-specific livestock and pet clubs
• NRA and State Rifle and Pistol Association training and shooting events
• Fiber guilds (spinning and weaving) and local knitting clubs
• Mountain Man/Rendezvous clubs (black-powder shooting, flint knapping, soapmaking, rope making, etc.)
• University/county agricultural extension and Cattlemen’s Club classes on livestock, gardening, weed control, canning, etc.
• Medical Corps (medicalcorps.org) small group classes. They offer great training—including advanced lifesaving topics that the American Red Cross doesn’t teach—at very reasonable cost.
• Volunteer Fire Department (VFD) classes (usually with some commitment)
• Candle and soapmaking clubs/conventions
• Boy Scouts and
4-H. Informal, unenrolled (“straphanger”) training is available for adults—just take your kids to the meetings and don’t leave. Consider becoming a scout leader.
Start with a “List of Lists”
You should start your family-preparedness stocking effort by first composing a List of Lists, then draft prioritized lists for each subject on separate sheets of paper. (Or in a spreadsheet if you are a techno-nerd like me. Just be sure to print out a hard copy for use when the power grid goes down!)
It is important to tailor your lists to suit your particular geography, climate, and population density as well as your peculiar needs and likes/dislikes. Someone setting up a retreat in a coastal area is likely to have a far different list than someone living in the Rockies.
Distinguishing Wants from Needs in Preparedness Planning
My consulting clients often ask me for advice on their preparedness purchasing programs. Some of the items that I’ve seen them purchase in the name of preparedness make me wonder. For example, a family that recently relocated from Michigan to Idaho’s Clearwater River Valley purchased matching snowmobiles for every member of the family. But they now live in a climate where in some years they only have snow that sticks for two or three weeks. In most years they will have to put their snow machines on trailers to get up to the high country to use them.
Most of my consulting clients take a methodical, well-balanced approach to their planning and procurement. It is the people who are clever, methodical, and hardworking who are better prepared than the wealthy few who just throw money at the problem. Do your best to make a purchasing plan and stick to it. Don’t go overboard in one area at the expense of another. Preparedness takes balance: food storage, gardening supplies, canning supplies, medical gear, communications gear, reliable vehicles, fuel storage, field gear, cold-weather gear, night-vision equipment, and so forth. Maintaining that balance takes both focused planning and self-control.
The TEOTWAWKI Weekend Experiment
A great way to create truly commonsense preparedness lists is to take a three-day TEOTWAWKI Weekend Experiment with your family. When you come home from work on Friday evening, turn off your main circuit breaker, turn off your gas main (or propane tank), and shut your main water valve (or turn off your well pump). Spend that weekend in primitive conditions. Practice using only your storage food, preparing it on a woodstove (or camping stove).
A TEOTWAWKI Weekend Experiment will surprise you. Things that you take for granted will suddenly become labor intensive. False assumptions will be shattered, but as you regroup and tailor your plan, your family will grow closer and more confident. Some of the most thorough lists that you will ever make will be those written by candlelight.
Your List of Lists Should Include:
• Water List
• Food-Storage List
• Food-Preparation List
• Personal List
• First-Aid/Minor-Surgery List
• Chem/Nuke-Defense List
• Biological-Warfare- and Pandemic-Defense List
• Gardening List
• Hygiene/Sanitation List
• Hunting/Fishing/Trapping List
• Power/Lighting/Batteries List
• Fuels List
• Firefighting List
• Tactical-Living List
• Security—General
• Security—Firearms
• Communications/Monitoring List
• Tools List
• Sundries List
• Survival-Bookshelf List
• Barter and Charity List
Specific Recommendations for Developing Your Lists
Water List (For details, see Chapter 4.)
• House downspout conversion sheet metal work and barrels.
• Think through how you’ll draw water from open sources. Buy extra containers. Don’t buy big barrels. Five-gallon food-grade buckets are the largest size that most people can handle without back strain.
• For transporting water if and when gas is too precious to waste, buy a couple of heavy-duty two-wheel garden carts—convert the wheels to foam-filled “no-flats” tires. You will find lots of other uses for those carts around your retreat, such as hauling (of hay, firewood, manure, etc.).
• Treating water. Buy plain Clorox hypochlorite bleach. A little goes a long way. Buy some extra half-gallon bottles for barter and charity. If you can afford it, buy a “Big Berky” British Berkefeld ceramic water filter.
Food-Storage List (For details, see Chapter 5.)
Lay in an honest one-year supply of storage food for your family:
• Start by increasing the quantities of canned foods that you use on a regular basis.
• Buy some short-term Get out of Dodge foods that don’t require adding water, such as military-specification Meals, Ready To Eat (MRE).
• Build a large supply of wheat, rice, beans, honey, and salt, in five- or six-gallon food-grade buckets.
• Rotate your storage food consistently, using the First-In, First-Out (FIFO) inventory methodology.
• Store extra food for charity and barter.
Food-Preparation List
• Having more people under your roof will necessitate having an oversize skillet and a huge stew pot. You will want to buy several huge kettles, because odds are you will have to heat water on your woodstove for bathing, dish washing, and clothes washing.
• You will need even more kettles, barrels, and five- or six-gallon PVC buckets—for water hauling, rendering, soapmaking, and dying. They will also make great barter or charity items. To quote my mentor Dr. Gary North: “Nails: Buy a barrel of them. Barrels: Buy a barrel of them!”
• Don’t overlook skinning knives, gut-buckets, gambrels, and meat saws.
Personal List
Make a separate personal list for each family member.
• Spare glasses
• Prescription and nonprescription medications
• Birth control
Fitness List
• Keep dentistry up to date.
• Any elective surgery that you’ve been postponing
• Work off that gut.
• Stay in shape.
• Back strength and health—particularly important given the heavy manual tasks required for self-sufficiency
• “Comfort” items to help get through high-stress times (books, games, CDs, chocolate, etc.)
First-Aid/Minor-Surgery List (For details, see Chapter 8.)
When tailoring this list, consider your neighborhood going for many months without power, extensive use of open flames, and sentries standing picket shifts exposed to the elements. Then consider axes, chain saws, and tractors being wielded by newbies, and a greater likelihood of gunshot wounds. With all of this, add the possibility of no access to doctors or high-tech medical diagnostic equipment.
• Put a strong emphasis on burn-treatment first-aid supplies.
• Don’t overlook do-it-yourself dentistry. (Oil of cloves, temporary-filling kit, extraction tools, etc.)
• Buy a full minor-surgery outfit containing inexpensive Pakistani stainless steel instruments, even if you don’t know how to use them all yet. You may have to learn, or you will have the opportunity to put them in the hands of someone experienced who needs them.
Chem/Nuke-Defense List
• Dosimeter, rate meter, and charger
• Radiac meter (handheld Geiger counter)
• Rolls of sheet plastic (for isolating airflow to air-filter inlets and for covering window frames in the event that windows are broken due to blast effects)
• Duct tape
• HEPA filters (and spares) for your shelter
• Potassium iodate (KIO3) tablets to prevent thyroid damage
• Outdoor shower rig for just outside your shelter entrance.
Biological-Warfare- and Pandemic-Defense List (For details, see Appendix C.)
• Disinfectants
• Hand sanitizer
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• N95 respirator masks
• Steam vaporizer
• Expectorant
• Antibiotic and antiviral medications
How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It Page 3
