Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale

by Michaels, Brian

  These places were called China, Russia, and a lot of other names. The people that lived there were different from us. They thought differently than we did and mostly that they didn’t like us.

  We watched old war movies together where he showed me how we were attacked and bombed.

  He explained that my hideout was where we would go in the event that any of those people tried to bomb us.

  He explained that is why there was food and water in the shelter and why I wasn’t supposed to eat the food now.

  We would need it in case we were attacked, besides there was enough food in the house for me to eat.

  When I asked why I couldn’t go to the bathroom in the shelter the answer was simple, it made the shelter stink.

  If we ever had to live in the shelter, it would soon smell bad enough in there. He said we didn’t want to start out with a stinky shelter.

  As a young child, I thought that was funny.

  The other thing he told me about that we had to be wary of was the government.

  After explaining to me what the government was, he told me they couldn’t be trusted.

  He said that the government didn’t start out that way, but with all the special interest groups in our country that the government was changing. All they did any more was pass laws that took the rights away from us normal people in favor of these other groups in our country.

  He explained that he wasn’t worried about the other countries as much as he was about what the government was doing.

  He felt that the government was destroying the country.

  I didn’t really understand most of what he told me, but I listened and tried to understand the best I could.

  After all, my dad was the smartest person I knew and if he said the government couldn’t be trusted, then they couldn’t be trusted.

  As I grew up, like most kids, I began to feel I was smarter than my dad.

  I guess I was a normal kid in that way.

  I especially felt that way after I went off to college.

  My dad wanted me to get a good education, so I would be prepared to survive in the modern world.

  He scrimped and saved so when the time came, I could go to college.

  After high school I went to Indiana University to begin my studies.

  My dad and I had many long discussions when I came home on break or during the summer months.

  As I look back now, I think I learned as much from my dad during those talks as I learned at college.

  Maybe the best thing I learned from my dad was how to think, make my own decisions and be my own man.

  As a grown man now, I don’t think the government is all bad, but I firmly believe you can’t trust them to do what is right. It seems that they mess up everything they get involved in and they are always trying to control everyone’s lives.

  My dad never passed up an opportunity to tell me about how the government screwed things up.

  On one of my breaks I remember after one long discussion with my dad about the Vietnam war, he asked me where I had heard all this crap I was telling him.

  I replied that it wasn’t crap that I had learned it at college.

  He went on to explain that he wanted me to be my own man and to be my own thinker and not to believe everything that I hear, especially from all those liberal professors at college.

  I asked him what did he mean by that?

  “Let me give you an example,” he replied then he asked me, “Why did we lose the Vietnam war?”

  “I guess because our soldiers weren’t as good as the Vietnamese at jungle warfare,” I replied.

  “What if I told you that we never lost a single major battle?” he asked.

  “That can’t be right,” I replied.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Then why did we lose the war?” I asked.

  “The reason we lost had little to do with the military and our ability to fight in the swamps and jungles of Vietnam,” He replied.

  “Then what happened?” I asked again.

  “When the Soviet Union collapsed in the eighties, our government sent the CIA over to go through all the KGB files and get a glimpse into what Russia had been secretly doing,” my dad explained. “In those records they found that after the second year of the war the North Vietnamese wanted to call a truce and sign an agreement like happened in the Korean war. They wanted to agree that they would divide the country into two parts and stay out of the south if the U.S. would stay out of the north and end hostilities.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I replied. “Why didn’t the war end at that point? Didn’t the U.S. want to agree to that?”

  “The U.S. never knew about the proposal until after the Soviet Union collapsed,” my dad replied. “You see the Soviet Union wouldn’t let North Vietnam make that proposal. They told North Vietnam to hang on for another year because they had a plan. Their plan was to infiltrate America’s college campuses and create a wave of antiwar sentiment in our country. The result was major antiwar protests around the country.

  The protestors painted a picture of our soldiers as baby killers and murders.

  Even though our military kept winning victories on the battlefield, the war quickly became very unpopular in our country.

  In order to quell the unrest at home, President Nixon stopped the war and brought home our men. So you see our military didn’t lose the war, our government lost the war. That’s what lost the war, I’m sure your college professors didn’t tell you any of that.”

  “No they didn’t,” I replied. “I just heard that we were on the wrong side and were finally driven out of the country.”

  “I agree it was possible that we backed the wrong side and should have never been there in the first place, but the Russian strategy was so successful that our enemies have been using it against us ever since,” he added.

  “Why didn’t the professors at school tell me about that” I asked.

  “Because it doesn’t paint the picture of our country that they want you to see,” my dad replied.

  “What else are they telling you at that school?” he laughed.

  We had many discussions over the years about what I was learning at college. He told me that I would learn many good things at school, but that I needed to understand that much of the time I would only be hearing one side of the story, mostly from some liberal professor who was pushing his own personal agenda. He said that I should keep an open mind and not take anything as the gospel truth until I had all the facts, then I should make up my own mind about things.

  He explained that in this big country, everyone grew up in their own little part of the country and because of that we all see things a little differently.

  In a way, everyone is right but also that everyone is wrong because we aren’t always looking at the big picture but are too focused on just a small part of it.

  Unfortunately, the government instead of focusing on what we all have in common and getting everyone working together, they have focused on our differences.

  On one trip home in our discussions about my studies in economics, he asked me if I knew what caused the big financial crisis in 2008.

  “That one is easy,” I replied. “The banks got greedy and made too many loans to people that couldn’t afford to pay them back.”

  My dad laughed, “I’m sure that’s what they told you at college, but the fact is that the government just used the banks as a scape goat for their own screwup.”

  My dad then continued to explain.

  “The big complaint about banks over the years has always been that they only made loans to people that didn’t need them,” he said. “In the nineties our President decided that due to the perceived inequalities in our country he was going to correct this by making more disadvantaged people homeowners.

  Homeowners had historically been better citizens and more socially responsible, so if he made more people homeowners it would correct a lot of problems.

  On the surface it soun
ded good, but in reality, it proved to be a disaster.

  His administration got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act which put various controls on the banks after the Great Depression. The act was meant to keep a tight rein on the banks in order to avoid another depression like we had in 1929.

  He then put his men in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government agencies that insured the mortgage loans made by the banks. The banks still resisted making what they called subprime mortgage loans, so he threatened to turn the Attorney General’s Office loose on the banks if they didn’t make more loans to the under privileged in our society.

  The Banks were told with the loans being insured by the government, what did they have to lose?

  Well when the loans started going bad, as the banks knew they would, the government pointed a finger at the banks and blamed everything on them for making bad loans and bringing the banking system to its knees.

  To complicate things even more, pension plans and the city and state governments are required to put their funds in safe investments. The safe investments that they were required to invest in was usually in blocks of government insured mortgages.

  So when the mortgages started going bad, not only the banking system was crippled, but also all the city, state and company pension plans in the entire country.”

  The things my dad told me often seemed to contradict a lot of what I was taught in college, but what he told me also seemed to make sense.

  It made me wonder why what he was telling me and what I learned at school were often very different, so I started my quest to learn more.

  As I looked into to all the differences, I discovered that what my dad told me had many facts to support his information.

  So why was there such a big difference between what I was told at college and what my dad said.

  I concluded it was all a matter of who was telling the story and what they wanted me to believe.

  If nothing else, talks with my dad did do one thing, I’m sure it was what he intended all along, it made me question everything I was told.

  It made me wary of anything the government said and did, especially when they say it is for my benefit.

  Someone always has an agenda and in order to get what they want, they only tell you what they want you to know.

  I finally graduated from Indiana University with a major in Economics and a minor in Psychology.

  I earned my Masters in Probability and Statistics.

  After graduating, I took a job with Citi Bank in New York.

  After a year I became an auditor for the bank and got to travel around the country on business.

  I met Emma, my wife, in Seattle and we soon got married and made our home in New York.

  A year later we started a family, Logan was the first new addition. A year later Katie was born.

  I kept in contact with my dad on a weekly basis where we continued our talks.

  I took the family each summer to Montana to visit my dad, but a few years after I had moved to New York he developed cancer and died six months later.

  It was the worst thing I had experienced in my life up to that point.

  Dad left me the house and all his property in his will.

  I didn’t have any use for a house with a bomb shelter in Montana, but for some reason I didn’t want to sell it.

  I kept it up the best I could and used it as a vacation home.

  The house reminded me about the good times with my dad and about the good man he was.

  I would go back each summer and let the kids play in the bomb shelter like I had done as a kid.

  My first instruction to the kids was that they were not allowed to use the port-a-potty in the shelter.

  Of course, they weren’t as interested in playing in the shelter as much as I did as a kid, times had changed and they had other interests.

  Meanwhile, my career progressed.

  As I had learned from my dad, I didn’t take anything I was told as the truth until I had examined it from all sides and made my own opinion.

  That approach came in very handy as an auditor and made me good at what I did.

  As I traveled the country, I found that much of the country was very different from what I had known as a kid.

  It made me think about all the things my dad and I had talked about over the years and why things were so different.

  The things I saw the government do in different states reinforced what my dad had told me about.

  I had to agree with my dad, our country was no longer a melting pot of people coming together to be one great country, it was becoming a collection of different cultures fighting for their own rights.

  In trying to accommodate all the various cultures, our government only managed to make the situation worse.

  In my travels I had audited many customer accounts that had been affected by free trade agreements between our country and other countries. The government said this was the fairest way to interact with the rest of the world.

  Again, on the surface it sounded like a good idea.

  All things being equal, it would have been a good idea, but unfortunately all things weren’t equal.

  Our country had a higher standard of living which meant that people in our country had higher wages.

  The result was that our corporations started moving their factories to other countries where wages were lower and where they could produce things a lot cheaper than they could in our country.

  That is why fewer and fewer things are now being manufactured in our country.

  This all reminded me of another conversation I had with my dad one day when I was home from college.

  “Son,” he asked. “Why did we win World War II?”

  I replied, “I think we won because we had better trained soldiers and better equipment.”

  “Not quite,” he smiled. “Our soldiers were drafted, put through basic training and then shipped to the front. No, Germany had the best trained army.

  As far as quality of equipment, did you know that when a Japanese sub fired a torpedo and it hit its target the torpedo exploded ninety-five percent of the time. On the other hand, our torpedoes only detonated seventy-five percent of the time. No, I believe that both Japan and Germany had better weapons at the start of the war.

  The real reason we won the war was because during the war our country produced seven times the amount of goods and equipment as the rest of the world combined.

  If we lost a ship we could replace it with seven more, when the enemy lost a ship they were lucky if they could replace it with another ship.

  As the war wore on and we destroyed their factories they weren’t even able to do that.

  Now recently did you know we had to delay the start of the gulf war by two weeks while we waited for the spare parts that we needed for our fighter jets to arrive from Japan.

  Part of the materials we need to make our bombs, we buy from China.

  We have gone from outproducing the entire world to this! How did those idiots in Washington let this happen?

  Are they that incompetent or was it intentional?

  Whatever the reason, we have our government to blame.”

  The final big eye opener for me was when I questioned the policies that put our country in this situation. I was told that we could afford to have our corporations move some of their operations to other countries because our country was wealthy. We were just sharing the wealth.

  It was explained to me that our relations with other countries would be better with free open trade arrangements and help raise their standard of living.

  With all the worlds countries becoming interdependent, there would be less conflict and we would all become one big happy world.

  Again, on the surface it sounded like a good idea.

  After a year of auditing major government agencies and corporations, I saw what was happening to our country and wondered why the government had let it continue.

  Our country was broke, we were bankrupt, but no one
wanted to admit it.

  Our country is borrowing a trillion dollars a year just to exist. The National Debt is getting larger each year and the tax receipts coming in each year are getting smaller due to the lower income of our citizens.

  Lower incomes because the higher paying jobs had disappeared because companies could reduce their expenses by moving to countries where their labor costs would be much lower.

  With lower incomes, the taxes collected are getting smaller, but the debt keeps getting larger.

  Pension plans are in trouble as lower wages have resulted in less money being contributed to the pension funds, this has resulted in companies being unable to keep up with payments to the retired.

  The government had taken the Social Security Trust Fund in the sixties and spent the money on new social programs.

  Since then all Social Security checks are paid from the country’s general fund.

  Social Security taxes being collected now are no longer enough to cover the monthly checks to the increasing number of the elderly in the country.

  When I looked at the big picture, I concluded that our entire financial system had become a Ponzi Scheme.

  What is the reaction to all of this by the people in our country? We have protestors carrying signs that say we need to increase the taxes on the wealthy.

  Over fifty percent of Americans do not pay any taxes. The wealthiest top ten percent of Americans pay ninety percent of all taxes paid. The governments policies have led to a conflict between classes. Those that don’t pay any taxes want those who do pay taxes to pay even more so they can have what they feel entitled too.

  I’m all for everyone paying their share but if you ask me the system is broke and no one has seemed to notice.

  From my estimates, I determined the whole system could collapse in the next five years. The system is unsustainable, but no one seems to care.

  All our money, plus what we we’re borrowing each year goes to pay the interest on the National debt, to pay Social Security, Medicare, welfare programs, government pensions and benefits and to bail out failing state pension plans around the country. Unlike what many say, we are not spending all our money on war or defense. Only six percent of the budget goes to that category.