Level Three Preparedness - Security
Level 3 Preparedness - Security
I start this section by acknowledging that for many of us it is very hard to think of our neighbors wanting to seriously harm us. It is my clear knowing and belief that we are all brothers and sisters, and we are all children of the one God. I am against the death penalty. I believe that it is wrong to make war, or attack another country or person because of what you fear they MAY do. I am a pacifist, and I believe strongly in the basic perfection and goodness of all people.
However, there are times when our brothers and sisters will go out of their minds as a result of pathology, abuse, or out of fear, desperation, or panic. A some of our brothers are violent criminals. When the day comes (if it does) when all is secure and familiar to our unprepared and dependent population collapses, the affect on many people will be very ugly. When people, or their children, are starving or cold and homeless, even our brothers they may attack us with intent of serious harm.
On the contrary, there are many examples of people in desperate times that have reacted with nobility and self-sacrifice. In this country, times of natural disaster, like floods and hurricanes and wild fires, have brought out the best people, when they have worked hard together to help each other through difficult and dangerous times. It is possible to argue that any likely future social collapse in this country will be a time that will bring out the best of our citizenry. There are also times when refuge populations have been calm and compliant.
So, will any future social or economic collapse bring out the best in the people of this country, or the worst? Will we share resources and pull together? Or will it be attack and ugliness?
My internal knowing about this is that the future time of trouble, for which many readers of this forum prepare, will lean towards ugliness and danger. There are two realities that support my belief. First, the populace of the United States is physically and psychologically unprepared for any kind of significant socio-economic collapse. Most of us have come to think of an uninterrupted supply of water, electricity, and groceries as a right of birth. Most have never been hungry for more than a few hours. A few days or a week without electricity, and few days or a week after grocery store shelves empty, especially with no news of rapid rescue, is something many will find impossible to deal with. This will bring panic, and panicked people are dangerous people.
Secondly, we are an armed populace. There are plenty of guns around. Desperate people might use them to forcefully take what they need to survive, or to be comfortable. But probably your next-door neighbor will not pose the real threat. The threat will probably come from the ones who live across town and that are already part of gangs, or already engage in criminal activity. An analogous situation might be the armed war lords of some nations of sub-Saharan Africa who have organized murderous militias to fill the power vacuum left by an impotent and bankrupt governments.
The level of danger will be greatly dependent upon the degree to which government collapses. A simple economic depression is not likely to cause the collapse of government authority and control. The level of future danger for which you choose to prepare, therefore, is probably closely tied to your vision or expectation regarding the likelihood of various futures.
So, how to prepare? It is my belief that in every possible future scenario, your very best security preparation is to be as invisible as possible. Your ideal country home will be remote, and hidden from people traveling main roadways. Hopefully your driveway is long, narrow and winding lane through the forest. Or your home is in a remote valley and near the end of a long dead end road. In some way, your ideal country home will be sited to render it as invisible as possible to the casual passerby, or to the marauding gang searching to steal food and gasoline.
Another way to protect your invisibility is to not speak with others about your disaster preparedness. Keep your preparations a secret. Do not even speak of them to your extended family members, unless those family members are actively participating with preparations. When the time comes, when they are finally feeling the danger and believing in the wisdom of your preparations, then you can gather them to you, with strict instructions to tell no one where they are going.
There are a few other small ways to protect your invisibility. Have blackout curtains prepared for all of your windows, so that the light from your candles, or kerosene lamps, or battery powered lights will not be visible at night. If you will be relying partially on a generator to charge batteries, consider a way to muffle the noise from a running generator. If you will be burning wood in a fireplace, be cognizant of the smoke from your chimney. Burn a hot fire to minimize smoke, or make a fire only after dark.
To further protect your invisibility don’t let yourself be known as a well-healed man. Even if you are not starving and desperate, act as if you are. Take steps to look as if you are as hungry and desperate as everyone else. Certainly don’t flaunt your wealth of food and fuel.
The question of arming yourself and being prepared to defend your family with force, is one that only your can answer. It is my strong value that the only circumstance in which it is acceptable to harm (or to kill) another person is when that is the only way to defend self, or another innocent person, against serious harm. I don’t have any moral objection to being prepared to use force to defend my family, but we need to be realistic about the threat. You might face a large marauding gang that can overpower almost any defensive preparations that a small group can make. If you are one person, or two, or a married couple plus children, it is easy to imagine scenarioes in which you will not be able to depend on rifle or two, and shotgun and a few handguns for security. It is easy to envision a scenario in which your little family group will be quickly overpowered by a large criminal gang, who by that time will have done the same thing to many small family groups. They will have killed before to take whatever they want, and they won't hesitate to do so again. This is one strong argument for making preparations that involve a larger group, or several families; that is you can have a meaningful defensive force in numbers. But if you are a small family group, your invisibility is even more vital. The details of how best to arm your family group, whether large or small is addressed in many threads on many forums.
How long will the threats last? Of course your vision of the likely futures are key to answering that question, but if we are preparing for a year or more without electricity, and without a functioning economy, the level of danger will change over time. The most dangerous period in any collapse will be the period of time between a week or two after the collapse of social order, and the time when the available supply of gasoline and diesel fuel are used up. As long as marauding gangs have access to stolen fuel to power stolen vehicles, you will be most vulnerable to them searching you out. It might take a month or two for all easy fuel sources to be found and consumed. Once the gasoline is gone, and once gangs are less mobile, the intensity of the threat will diminish somewhat. Always be vigilant, but be most vigilant in the first few weeks and months.
Hopefully these terrible scenarios will never come to pass. However, I share these ideas with you because there is a lot of superficiality to the preparedness planning that some sources encourage us to make. It won’t do much good to stockpile a year supply of food of someone comes along in the third week and takes it all from you and your family. And there are possible scenarios in which one can see significant chance of that very thing happening.
Take care.
