People Get Ready

One more from Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions - People Get Ready. It's more of a civil rights movement song than a prepper song but the way things are going, it seems to still be relevant, regardless of how you look at it.

This seems to be the year of natural disasters. Huge fires earlier in the year in Texas and Oklahoma, then Montana, and now California. Hurricanes in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Puerto Rico. We don't have to contend with forest fires or hurricanes here in the Mid-West but we do get tornadoes and snow storms. It's been pretty quiet as far as tornadoes this season but who knows what the winter will bring. With the way things are going, could end up raining frogs come December.

Or we could be hit by an EMP attack. I read the other day once again about just such an item. Now that North Korea has their ICBMs functional, those supposedly in the know say that up to 90% of the US population could perish if the grid goes down. That's scary. 100 years ago there was still a large percentage of the population living in the country, growing their own food and being mostly self-sufficient. It's not like that now. Hardly anyone is self-sufficient, and even if they are, will they be able to maintain that lifestyle when the grid goes down? If you were going to take the grid down, now would be an excellent time, what with FEMA and other emergency services already dealing with all the other natural disasters and with winter approaching. My garden is about done for the season and the fruit trees are likewise about finished for the season. The earliest I could expect new crops of any sort would be about eight months from now. No way I could go for eight months without resupply. Makes you wonder how the pioneers made it through their first winter. Lots of them didn't, I suppose.

There was an article about the mess in Puerto Rico in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Those people are in really sad shape due to a combination of factors. The island was in sad shape financially before the hurricane, the devastation was horrible and because it's an island, it's not easy getting supplies and equipment to them. No Cajun Navy to help those poor souls. If we here on the mainland had our power go down for a month, what would we do. People in a high rise apartment or the "rough" parts of the cities will be in a very, very bad way after only a few days, let alone a few weeks. After a couple of weeks I'm guessing it'll be like Lord of the Flies and they'll be looking at carving up the fat kids.

It looks like the government has done a fairly good job dealing with the disasters so far this year but I don't know if I want to count on them coming to the rescue if things go really sideways. I'm going to revisit my emergency plan and see what I can do to fill in a few of the blanks. You might be wise to do the same.