Beans And Shotgun Shells

More and more Americans preparing for social unrest

"From the outside, Jerry Erwin's home in the northwestern US state of Oregon is a nondescript house with a manicured front lawn and little to differentiate it from those of his neighbors.
But tucked away out of sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely within his lifetime.
"I've got, under an awning, stacks of firewood, rain catching in barrels, I've got a shed with barbed concertina wire, like the military uses," he told AFP.
He and his wife also have also stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition and enough food for about six months.
"Several years ago I worked on paying off the house, replacing all the windows, and just very recently, I'm proud to say, we've replaced all our exterior doors with more energy-efficient ones, with as much built-in security features as I could get," he told AFP.
Plus I'm going to be adding some more structural improvements to the door frames to make it hopefully virtually impossible to take a battering ram to them."
Erwin and others like him in the United States and elsewhere see political upheaval and natural disasters as clear signs that civilization is doomed.
"We're hitting on all cylinders as far as symptoms that have led other great powers to decline or collapse: resource depletion, damage to the environment, climate change, those are the same things that affected other great societies," he said.
For Erwin, the decline is irreversible and the best approach is to prepare for the inevitable.
His pessimism is shared by a wide range of people, from left-wing environmentalists who believe climate change and capitalist greed will doom human society to Christian fundamentalists who think sin will do the same.
They label themselves "preppers," "doomers," and "survivalists," and take a variety of different approaches to the same question: How best to prepare for the coming apocalypse?"

I have tens of thousands of rounds and enough food for years.
Mrs Lipstick and I have been preparing for decades and even moved to a better place to weather whatever storms come our way.
We have backups to backups in all areas of basic living arrangements. Down here in the dry SW I looked around, didn't see any water, and bought a big generator to work the deep well pump in case the juice goes out. Enough Stabylized gas in barrels for a long, long time. I'm growing a big garden and have two freezers stocked. Call me King of the Shitwipe with my stockpile of bath tissue in case the store shelves are emptied and we have to barter for our needs. An out of the way rural location with sufficiently tough neighbors to make common cause with in hard times.

I've seen collapse of our unsustainable stupidity for quite a while and worked hard to prepare for it's certain eventuality. My wife and I are as ready as humanly possible for any disaster short of a dinosaur impact and I'm proud of it. I despise 'popular' culture and I'm proud of that too. We're living in a society that's completely back asswards - everything is upside down and reversed. We have a government that hates freedom, a media that hates the truth, an educational system that hates knowledge, a medical system that despises health. The only thing our contemptible culture is doing is setting people up for disastrous heartache and suffering by pretending the whole nightmare is never ending and permanent. Far from it.