Though the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths continue to rise, there are signs that we are slowly flattening the curve. The number of reported deaths and cases from the country has edged lower for the third straight day which may indicate a flattening of the curve. This shows that some of the steps taken may slowly but surely be having a positive effect on this fight against Coronavirus.The world faces pandemics so infrequently that it is difficult to fully comprehend their effect. History, however, has taught us that illnesses like this don’t simply disappear. They continue to circle the Earth in wave after wave until humans can collectively develop some antigens to the virus and slow the rate of transmission. Just as the second major wave of the flu pandemic starting in 1918 was more deadly than the first, we can anticipate that subsequent waves of the Coronavirus may be even more deadly than this first wave.Fortunately, just knowing and accepting this fact can allow you to prepare better for subsequent waves of this virus. If history holds true, this current pandemic will loom like a shadow over the Earth for the next two years.
It’s Not Going to Disappear and Go Away
The ultimate hope in the fight against Coronavirus is to completely stop the virus and make it disappear forever. But in reality, that will not happen. Dr. Bruce Aylward, one of the top officials fighting the virus and a senior advisor to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-General, said in his interview with Time Magazine that numerous people believe Coronavirus is unlikely to disappear completely. One of the main reasons for this is that the virus is easily transmissible, which makes stopping it almost impossible. What’s likely to happen, according to Dr. Aylward, is the virus will go into a period of cyclical waves or become a low-level endemic disease. People need to, over time, build antigens to the illness. This will then break the direct line of transmission in some cases and slow the spread of the illness over time. The deadliest pandemic in history, the Spanish Flu, took several waves before it ended.The Spanish Flu began in 1918 and ended as a pandemic around late 1919. It infected about 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people. These figures are high, especially if you consider the fact that the rate of traveling during that time wasn’t as fast as today. Just like with Coronavirus right now, the world struggled in dealing and containing the Spanish Flu.The first case of the virus was reported on March 11, 1918, at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas. The first wave of the Spanish Flu in the U.S. started at military camps and it was believed that infected soldiers were the ones who spread it at the other camps across the country. Since this also happened during World War 1, it was also believed the soldiers were the ones who spread it overseas. But the spread of the virus was still sporadic. The second wave of the disease began in September 1918 at the US Army training camp, Camp Devens. The second wave was considered the deadliest. At that time, the war was ending and thousands of soldiers were returning home and spreading the disease to the general public. The third wave of the disease occurred during the winter and spring of 1919. The pandemic finally ended during the summer of 1919 when those who were infected either died or developed immunity. This created transmission gaps between people and slowed the spread of the virus.Though the pandemic ended, the virus continued to spread. Because of the transmission gaps, herd immunity, better treatment options, and public awareness its spread was not as prolific. And while a flu vaccine does provide some protection against strains of Influenza, like the Spanish Flu, they do not provide 100% immunity. A 2012 study showed that the Influenza flu vaccine was deemed effective 67% at that time.This is what we will inevitably experience with the Coronavirus. Similar to what government and health officials did before, containment and limiting its spread are the key methods implemented while a vaccine is being developed and/or people start to develop immunity to the disease. While these are proven methods to mitigate the deaths from Coronavirus, the virus itself will likely never disappear or “go away.” We will, hopefully, just develop better methods of combating it.
Vaccines Take Time and are Difficult to Create
But developing a vaccine for Coronavirus is not easy and, as mentioned earlier, does not provide 100% immunity from the virus. Vaccines are designed to boost the body’s ability to develop antigens. The “novel” nature of the Coronavirus–its newness–is what makes it spread so fast and what makes it difficult for our bodies to recognize it as an invader that needs to be attacked by our immune system. There are 2 factors that are making it challenging for health professionals and scientists to quickly develop a vaccine–the time it takes and the fact that the virus is mutating.Developing a vaccine that the general public can use takes time. Health officials and scientists need to make sure that the vaccine is safe and effective for everyone. According to an article from The Guardian, the timetable for rolling out a usable vaccine for the general public is around 12 to 18 months. Though some experts have estimated that a vaccine could be available within 6 months or earlier. This experimental and not thoroughly tested vaccine would only, initially, be available for front line individuals, like healthcare workers.The general public would have to wait around 12 to 18 months for the actual vaccine. Keep in mind, that even with a vaccine, 100% protection isn’t possible. Viruses mutate. One of the factors that make it difficult to develop a vaccine is the virus itself.It is not unusual for viruses to evolve or mutate. In fact, the novel Coronavirus that we are experiencing right now is not a virus that just popped out of nowhere. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that contain many different strains. Most of these virus strains cause only mild infections in the human respiratory system. This specific Novel Coronavirus, by some estimations, has mutated into up to 7 distinct genetic strains.When this particular virus infects us, it attaches to our cells and makes copies of its genetic material through RNA. RNA replication is not as exact as DNA replication, so copying mistakes happen. The sometimes mutated copy may have similarities to its former self, but the human body’s immune system may not comprehend it. Thus, any new mutation or strain results in scientists and researchers having to modify their vaccine to increase its efficacy.As the COVID-19 virus continues to spread and infect people, scientists and health officials are expecting the virus to continue to mutate. No one can really predict how much a virus will change or mutate, the only thing we can do is continue to sequence it, research it, and leverage science toward the development of a cure.
Governments Don’t Coordinate Efforts Well
Another reason why the worst may yet to come in this fight against Coronavirus is that governments aren’t coordinating best practices. A majority of the governments from around the world implemented community lockdowns or quarantines to try and flatten the spread of Coronavirus. They also shut down large gatherings, implemented social distancing, and did mass testing to further lessen the spread of the virus. However, not all governments shared the same strategy. The United Kingdom, for example, wanted to only do gradual restrictions.They didn’t plan on shutting down large gatherings or implementing quarantines. Their strategy for dealing with the virus was to use herd immunity– hoping enough people fought it off to break the transmission links from person-to-person. It’s a strategy where the goal is to have a community build immunity to the disease. This is done either by a vaccine or by building natural immunity. Since the Coronavirus doesn’t have a vaccine yet, building natural immunity was their hope.There are 2 major flaws in using this building a natural immunity strategy. First, this means a majority of the community will have to contract the disease, which could overwhelm hospitals and healthcare systems. The second flaw is that scientists and healthcare officials are not sure if you can contract the virus more than once. There are even reported cases of recovered patients testing positive from Coronavirus again, which shows it’s hard to build immunity against the virus.But the worst part about not coordinating best practices is that there are those who completely ignore the threat of Coronavirus. One example of this is what happened in the U.S., Australia, and certain parts of Europe. These countries had a hard time shutting down social gatherings and implementing social distancing protocols because of democratic ideologies and people’s sense of personal liberties. Many people still went to beaches, tourist spots, and social gatherings. There were also numerous companies and stores that remained open. Without governments working as one or having at least a consistent policy, curbing the virus’ spread is almost impossible.Social distancing, testing and tracking of infected individuals, and effective strategies to allow individuals who have developed antigens to return to work are the only known ways of defeating the Coronavirus; however, some countries, states, and individuals do not globally implement these known ways. This allows the virus to continue to find a foothold in our communities.Recently, U.S Governors on the north-east and west-coast announced a joint effort to reopen their state economies. Each state would participate in a working group and discuss when they should relax the stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses. They have committed to using science, data, and the help of experts in coming up with a decision on how they will go about it. It is only through these types of coordinated efforts between communities and countries that the spread of the virus can be slowed and, possibly, halted, before health centers are overwhelmed.
Some Communities and Individuals Don’t Take it Seriously
The Coronavirus is not only infecting and killing people, but it is also exposing a country’s weaknesses. Numerous governments around the world are ill-prepared to deal with this outbreak. This is one of the major reasons why COVID-19 spread rapidly in certain countries.Many experts believed that the U.S. is the country that is most equipped to deal with a pandemic because of the different resources it can use. However, the Coronavirus outbreak has proven that the country is still not adequately prepared to deal with it.From a medical standpoint, the country lacked enough hospital beds to deal with the thousands of Americans that will likely require hospitalization during the pandemic. There have not been enough testing kits to conduct mass testing on suspected cases. Though pandemics, to some degree, occur on a semi-centennial basis, governments around the globe have revealed that they are woefully underprepared for these events. As a result, we can expect the Coronavirus to continue to spread. Any government’s plans and actions, however, alone won’t be enough to fight against Coronavirus. It’s important for every individual to do their part as well. When measures like social distancing, avoiding mass gatherings, and staying indoors as much as possible were implemented, many people didn’t follow them. They still went to gatherings, attended social events, conducted parties, and so on.This contributed greatly to the Coronavirus’s initial rapid spreading. Though this can be frustrating, there is actually a psychological reason for this rebellious action. The director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center of Brown University, Judson Brewer, M.D. Ph.D. said that anxiety is one of the main reasons people are acting out against government orders. He stated that defying good practice protocols gives some people a sense of control over the situation, thus lessening their anxiety.As individuals continue to ignore common sense practices to slow the spread of the virus, it will continue to spread rapidly. Protests and calls to reopen governments may come at the cost of human lives. Whereas a slowed infection rate could lead to gradual herd immunity, better medicines to fight the symptoms, and possibly a vaccine before medical facilities are overwhelmed.
It’s Not Too Late to Prepare for the Next Wave of the Pandemic
No one can accurately predict when the next wave of the Coronavirus pandemic will hit. The current rate of spread will likely decline and then resurge along with the regular flu season in the fall. If it’s community spread is similar to the Spanish Flu pandemic, it will likely follow that course. The good news is we can still be proactive in preparing ourselves and our families for what might come next. The government will likely continue to come out with announcements, and orders to try and help keep the virus under control. But it’s important to remember that the government is slow to respond and will likely take time in aiding you or not be there for you at all. This is why preparing yourself and your family is crucial for your survival when the next waves hit. Here are some of the things that you can do to prepare:
Store non-perishable foods – You cannot know the full effect of food distribution chains being interrupted. Recently, a South Dakota pork processing plant was forced to shut down when 200 of its workers tested positive for the virus. Storing food early and making a few purchases of a little extra than you think you might need will ensure you are prepared in case the food supply is disrupted. Canned goods are the staple food to stock up if the lockdown/quarantine lasts longer. Make sure you have canned vegetables and fruits so you can still get adequate vitamins and minerals. You can also stock up on high-energy and high caloric foods like nuts and trail mixes, granola bars, power bars, and dry pasta.
Learn gardening – It’s also important that you take this time to learn gardening, even if the kitchen is the only space you have. The beauty of gardening is that you don’t really need a big area to begin. You can start with a small garden and grow a few vegetables and fruits that you can consume or even use for bartering. Patio containers or even a well-lit window sill can provide you with some supplemental foods. Bean sprouts can be made in a jar with a few holes in the lid and could provide you with critical nutrients if things turned really bad. Knowing how to grow food crops will also ensure that you can survive even if your food stock becomes depleted.
Purchase Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) – It is also imperative that you have PPE that you and your family can use, especially when the next wave of Coronavirus hits the country. Having PPE will ensure added protection for you and your family, especially if you’re going out or you need to evacuate.
Conclusion
The Coronavirus pandemic may be slowing down, considering the number of new cases and deaths are edging lower. However, this doesn’t mean we can start relaxing. This is just the beginning, and though there are signs that the pandemic is slowing down, there are actually reasons to believe the worst is yet to come.So to summarize the main points of this blog, we need to accept, first, that the Coronavirus isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. As history has shown us, virus pandemics come in waves, and it is logical that this Coronavirus will also come in waves. What we are experiencing right now, as terrible as it is, is just the first wave, and there are likely several more waves to come. Second, we should realize governments from around the world don’t coordinate best practices. One of the key things needed to fight against this pandemic is for everyone to work together. But, so far, most governments have their own way of dealing with the problem, not realizing that there’s really no borders when it comes to this virus. Also, individuals within your community who don’t maintain vigilance allow the virus to spread further.If you found this article informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.
When the U.S. implemented a lockdown due to the Coronavirus, this forced numerous businesses to shut down and countless people to lose their source of income. This raised concerns that a recession, or even a depression, is on the horizon. The ones who usually suffer the most during a market downturn are the people, especially those who are not prepared and are living month-to-month. Unfortunately, a recent study revealed that almost half of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Furthermore, more than half of Americans couldn’t even safely write a check for over $500.Though this is scary, it is not as dire as it sounds. Economies are cyclical, undergoing ups and downs. Many factors usually contribute to an economy going into a recession or depression. Greed and corruption are typically the worst culprits. As our history has shown, our economy always re-emerges from a downturn. To lessen the economic impact, we can look at the historical preparations that previous generations made so we can better prepare ourselves and our family from a potential economic depression.In this blog, we’ll discuss 5 things you can do now if you’re concerned about a potential long-term economic depression. The points we’ll cover are from lessons learned studying previous times in history where major economic downturns impacted nations.
Know How To Change Your Diet
Food is going to be the most critical resource we will need during an economic depression. Not only because there may be an interruption with the food supply, but because many people can’t afford the food they are used to eating. Many are very dependent on other people growing, gathering, harvesting, and preparing most of the food that they consume daily. They go to grocery stores and spend money to buy processed and prep-prepared food that they can easily cook at home. Some people don’t even cook at all. They go to restaurants and pay others to prepare their meals. But during a depression, these things become a luxury that numerous people won’t be able to afford.What this means is that you may have to learn to eat foods that don’t have the big three: soy, wheat, and corn. These three grains are the main ingredients found in most of the processed food available in supermarkets. Reading the labels, you will find that at least one of these three grains or their derivatives (like corn syrup, cornstarch, and corn oil) is the main ingredient included in a majority of the food you are buying. Skipping on foods that use these 3 grains is also good for your health since you’re adding variety to your food and more nutrients to your body. So, what other foods can you and your family consume that won’t put you in a financial burden or make you sick during a depression?Early humans didn’t rely on others to plant, harvest, and process their foods. They foraged, hunted, and fished for the food that they and their family consumed. Even if you don’t live in the woods, it’s still possible to forage. There are numerous different fruit trees found in people’s yards or public parks that you can easily pick. In Oregon, many city parks have trees that drop walnuts on the ground. However, only local wildlife eats them since maintenance workers in the park just throw them away. Walnuts are just one example, there are many different varieties of foods that you can readily pick up in your environment. You can search the internet or go to your library and learn the different edibles found in your local area. Make sure you have a print-out of the research or a copy of the important pages in the book so you can readily look at it if needed.You should also know where you can hunt or fish and what are the requirements. If the land is public, ask your local government what you need to do. If it’s privately owned, try and build connections with the owner. The key to foraging is knowing your environment and having a plan of action. We’re working on a future blog about foraging in the urban and suburban environments, so if you would like to know when that comes out remember to subscribe to this channel.
Build Your Library
Another thing you need to prepare for that can help you during an economic depression are books. It is important to build your library of books that can provide you with critical knowledge and information that you can use during the depression. We already mentioned earlier the importance of having books about foraging, hunting, and fishing to help you secure food when you are unable to purchase them at your local supermarket. Aside from foraging books, you should also have medical books, which you can use as a reference and guide in case you or someone from your family gets sick or needs immediate first aid.Other helpful books that you can include in your library are language guides for your region and atlases. You should also have cookbooks and books about gardening, which can help you get through an economic crisis. Don’t forget to add some novels or other fiction books that you always wanted to read in your library. It’s easy to get stressed out, anxious, or overly worried during a depression. Having books that can let you temporarily escape your situation can help relieve your stress and keep you sane.Having your own small library is critical since you never know how long the internet or electricity could stay on in your area. Having lived in impoverished parts of the world, you learn quickly that the power may not always be up and having a reliable internet source may not even be an option, especially at your home. It’s not wise to expect that they will always be available, so having a back-up plan is crucial. Even a small library of different books ensures you will still have access to information, as well as other forms of entertainment. We’ll put a link in the cards above and in the description section to books that you might want to include in your prepping library. We’ll also do another blog about building a prepping library in the near future.
Build Your Skills in Life and Vocation
Financial security will be one of the biggest concerns during a depression. Keeping jobs is going to be hard but finding a new one will be tougher. Though it’s a good idea to have an emergency fund so you’ll have access to money in case you get laid off, it won’t be enough. You also need to learn new skills or further develop the ones that you have. Having a new skill could potentially help you keep your job or make you an attractive candidate to other employers. You could learn a new language and become an interpreter. You could also learn or upgrade your skills with computer software applications.Being an attractive employee is not the only thing you should consider. You should also develop skills that you can use to help you start a side business or a new vocation. Building a side hustle has become more and more popular in this new gig economy we currently live in. We have found websites like Lynda can provide you with so much quality information to learn a new skill set. You could even learn new skills that you always wanted to learn, like playing the guitar, or baking. Try and spend at least an hour a night pursuing a new skill that interests you. Again, there are many educational websites that can teach you many skills. Even if there are no jobs available at the moment, developing a new skill can help make you marketable in the future when the economy is back on track. But aside from making you a marketable candidate for job opportunities, a new skill can also help keep you sane and provide you a sense of accomplishment in an unstable world.As we said earlier, stress and anxiety are going to be a common feeling during an economic depression. Though books can help you relax and keep sane, working on developing and improving yourself is also important. According to an article from Lifehack, as you improve and develop skills, you also get to learn more about yourself, thus improving your mental health. Even a simple workout program that you can follow during this period is a way to feel a sense of accomplishment. Speaking of mental health, one class we’ve begun to recommend to family members during this time where many of us are in quarantine is Yale University’s most popular online course which is now free online, “The Science of Well-Being”. We’ve gotten a lot of encouraging feedback from individuals we’ve recommended this to. We’ll post a link to the course in the description section below.
Work for Necessity not Currency
Working conditions during an economic depression will be different. The traditional work-for-money scenario where you work for one employer and receive a timely paycheck might not be reliable. In the current economic climate of the pandemic, many businesses in this situation are folding and filing for bankruptcies. You need to think outside the box here and see what other side jobs you can do other than traditional employment. You should also be willing to work for necessity and not currency. What this means is that you may want to work in exchange for other types of resources like food, water, or other items you may need.For example, if you are good at carpentry and there’s a plumbing problem in your home, you might find a plumber in your community and negotiate with him to fix your plumbing problem in exchange for any carpentry task he has. You can also do odd jobs in exchange for resources. You can negotiate to mow a lawn in exchange for picking a few fruits off an apple tree in a neighbor’s backyard. You could offer to clean a neighbor’s garage in exchange for some eggs. Aside from manual labor, you can also use your knowledge. If you have a degree in mathematics or English, you can use it to do tutoring services in your neighborhood in exchange for various resources. If you are knowledgeable about gardening, you can offer to teach people how to start a mini garden in their homes. There are many things you can do in exchange for various non-monetary resources.You will be surprised to see that people are willing to work for you or exchange with you if currency, which may be scarcely available or doesn’t hold any more value, is removed from the equation. You will also see that many skills will be in demand during a depression. In fact, many of them are likely to be more in-demand than actual goods, especially if the situation lasts longer. Skills like first aid/medical, gunsmithing, weaving/sewing, mechanical knowledge, teaching, tradecraft (plumbing, blacksmith, electrical), and even survival skills are the ones which will be in high demand. Possessing at least one of these skills will ensure you will have something of value that people are willing to barter for.
Adjust Your Finances
The last thing you will need to prepare for during a depression is your finances. Just because there is a crisis situation it doesn’t mean that your debts are automatically forgiven. They are still there and you will still be asked to pay them. Fortunately, there are programs that can provide relief and help you manage your debts and loans. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Federal Government passed the Farm Mortgage Act, which was a program to help farmers who were defaulting on their mortgage payments to the lenders. Some of the key aspects of the program were low-interest rates for farmers and principal forbearance. Forbearance is a program where borrowers allow a person to skip or make reduced payments during the duration of the agreement. It’s a relief program that lenders and creditors usually grant to borrowers instead of foreclosing on their property. It’s a win-win situation since borrowers will get temporary relief from paying their mortgage while lenders won’t have to shoulder the loss of property. Because of the Coronavirus, many Americans are already requesting forbearance on their mortgage payments.Debt deferment is another program that can help in adjusting your finances and managing your debts. Debt deferment is a program that gives you a period of time where you are excused from making any payments at all because of certain circumstances in your life. The best program to really help your finances is debt forgiveness. Unlike the other 2 programs, debt forgiveness means you are no longer required to repay some or all of your loans. During the Great Recession, debt relief was one of the major reasons why some states recovered fast. According to a study from Yale Insights, states that were more generous in providing debt relief to people through the consumer bankruptcy system had an increase in local employment during the recession. It’s important to remember that each state will likely have different policies, programs, and requirements for their debt management programs. You should do your research and ask around so you know which programs you can take advantage of when the time comes.Aside from managing debt, it’s also critical that you reduce your dependency on paper currency. When the value of the dollar becomes worthless during a depression, other means of exchange available will be precious metals or electronic payment modes. In this scenario, gold and silver will be valuable, since farmers and merchants will be more than willing to sell their goods and services for an ounce of precious metal bullion. Precious metals retain value when currency does not. We’ll post a link in the description section and pin a comment linking to the website where we personally purchase my precious metals. Electronic payment modes like PayPal and Venmo may also be valuable, especially when banks fail. If you have some balance on your accounts, you can use them, at least temporarily, as a way to pay for goods and services. We’ll be talking more specifically about precious metals in a future blog.ConclusionWith the way the Coronavirus pandemic is affecting businesses and economies, it’s not far-fetched to think that the next issue we might face is an economic recession or even a depression. Because economic downturns are cyclic in nature, it’s important that we properly prepare ourselves for that eventuality.To summarize the main points discussed in this blog, the first thing you need to know is that food is going to be the most crucial resource during a depression. The situation will have a significant financial impact on countless people, which means many can’t afford to buy the foods that they want to eat. Changing your diet and knowing edible foods that you can easily pick up within your area will be a key to your survival. Second, you should consider building a library of important books that can provide useful knowledge and information during the depression. You should also learn and develop new skills, which can help you keep a job or make you an attractive candidate for companies during a recovery. It’s also important that you think outside the box when it comes to working during an economic depression. The traditional way of working won’t be reliable during this period. Being able to work for necessities instead of currency will increase your chances of surviving and even thriving in this situation. Lastly, it’s important to remember to adjust your finances. There are many different programs you can search for that the government provides to help consumers manage their debts during a national crisis.
If you found this article informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.
Regardless of the situation, the most valuable resource you possess after food, water, and shelter are the skills you can bring to bear to survive and to help others to survive. Unlike food or water or shelter, you can’t be robbed of your learned skills. All the tools in the world, all the neat survival gadgets, are rendered useless if you don’t have the skills to properly use them. And, though much can be said about pursuing recession or depression proof occupations, jobs can evaporate in a truly horrific grid down situation. When your job is rendered non-essential, will you have the skills you need to survive? In this blog, we’ll look at 10 skills to develop that will be sought after and actually pay during a depression.While we often look in the prepper community gear as important (and it is), skills are just as important, if not more so, as they can not be taken from you and are an asset that can provide returns. The value of these skills really became apparent during the great depression in the 1930s, but all of them date back thousands of years. While jobs and careers may disappear amongst the waves of an ever-increasing unemployment rate, just like our grandparents, great or great-great-grandparents, having a set of skills can keep you and your family alive. You may choose just one skill to learn, but you will be more successful with a range of these basic skills. Here are the top 10 skills to know before the world falls apart that would be very valuable to have and would actually generate income in the event of a major economic downturn.
Hunting & Fishing
Perhaps one of the oldest skills, hunting and fishing puts meat on the table. Most people today are heavily reliant upon the meat and fishing industries to put protein on their plates. Industrial meat and fishing production have introduced a wide range of toxins to our tables as well. From Escherichia coli, commonly known as E. coli, to high levels of Mercury in our seafood, our over-dependence on industrial sources of meat is a fragile source when health is also at stake. Also, the types of meats we put on our plate lacks variation. There are hundreds of chicken breeds in existence, for instance, yet industrial farming only produces a few. According to FishBase, a global species database, there are over 33,000 different types of fish, yet the average American could probably list the types of fish they have eaten on one hand- two hands at the most.It’s great to have an emergency fishing line and hook in your tackle, but will you know how to use it when the time comes? Have you ever processed meat for your own table? Hunting and fishing are skills you need to know, not only so you can secure food for your table, but so you can trade food for other things you may need. If money becomes relatively worthless because of an economic collapse and hyperinflation, venison steaks, frog legs or a 20lb Catfish hold tremendous value.
Foraging
The second skill to get you by is foraging. Just as our tables lack diversity when it comes to meats, they also lack diversity when it comes to the edible plants we consume. Foraging for food is an essential skill to cultivate now– that pun is intended. Did you know you can eat the entire sunflower plant, not just the seed? Did you know you can eat daisies and many other flowers? Do you know what mushrooms, berries, and nuts you can eat? If you grew up in the Midwest or South, maybe you harvested gooseberries for grandma’s gooseberry pie. Knowing what parts of what plants are edible and in your area is critical to having food on your table when the normal supply chains we are overly-dependent upon disappear and our own stores of food dwindle low.
Gardening & Farming (plants & animals)
Gardening and farming are the third skill types that will help you to survive through an extended depression. Remember, the Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted nearly a decade. Another depression may last just as long or longer. In another blog, we will be discussing apartment gardening, but if you are fortunate enough to have an area to garden, farm, or even raise chickens, goats or some other animal that produces food beyond their own meat, knowing these skills will allow you to thrive amidst the suffering. These skills put food directly on your table and, when done right, provide you with saleable or exchangeable products to carry your family through an extended economic downturn.
Cooking & Canning
Surviving a depression relies heavily upon your ability to not waste anything. Most of the meats used in modern barbecue were deemed inedible and given to poor folks or slaves. The long slow cooking and spicing of the tough meats created something delicious. Barbecue and smoking was used to preserve meat. After all, it would be difficult and foolish to attempt to eat a whole cow or pig in one sitting. So, cooking and not wasting foods are a critical part of surviving. During the Dust Bowl, where drought, rabbits, or grasshoppers wiped out almost all the vegetation, brined tumbleweed became food for consumption. Russian thistle, or tumbleweed, grew rampantly during this period—one of the few plants that could survive the harsh conditions. People became so desperate that they started to brine the tumbleweed, rendering it edible.Our over-dependence on the pre-processed, pre-cooked food supply sources will make it very hard for many in a post-collapse environment. Knowing how to cook, can, and preserve your food are critical skills to keep you and your family fed through an economic depression. Once your family’s essential food needs are met, your surplus can be sold, bartered, or traded for other things you need. Four cups of dried beans that have been cooked can feed many, many hungry mouths.
Baking
Ask a cook if he bakes or a baker if she cooks. The fact is that baking is a skill all in itself that can’t just be lumped in with cooking. Baking is a science that requires some exact measurements and precise temperatures and time. It’s not a skill you can just instantly pick-up, which is why you need to practice it before you really need to. Having just one bread loaf recipe or one cookie recipe won’t be enough to get you through a significant economic downturn. What will you do when flour isn’t available? Or butter? Or milk? You should know how to make flour from other sources, like acorns, chickpeas, or rice. Explore old recipes. Know how to make hardtack and not just a loaf of white bread. Try out other recipes now, before you absolutely need to.
Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting, Brading, Knot tying
Sewing, knitting, crocheting, braiding, knot tying, and any manipulation of textiles or threads and ropes are valuable skills to know in a prolonged economic depression. Whether you are knitting a blanket or hats to keep your children warm, repairing a last pair of jeans to last another year, or harvesting an old sweater to make threads for a fishing net, the manipulation of fabrics and threads are a skill you can’t live without. Most people only know how to tie a square knot, but that won’t hold a heavy load or secure a fishing hook. Just as a single strand of rope isn’t as strong as multiple strands wound together, the more you know of these sciences the more likely you are to be able to produce what you need to survive and to have a skill in high demand in a post-collapse society.
Homebrewing & Fermentation
We put home brewing and fermentation together because the science of how they work is similar. Technically, we could have put it along with baking, since bread-making often involves yeast consuming sugars. That’s really all there is to fermentation and homebrewing, either yeast or bacteria consume available sugars and produces either alcohol or lactic acid. Both of those by-products are useful in their own ways. That, obviously, oversimplifies the process. There’s much to learn with these skills, and whether you’re making beer, mead, Dandelion wine, or pickled tumbleweed, they are skills you need to learn now. Making an error in the processes can create more waste than usable products. The fact of it all is that people will always want alcohol to consume, so having the skill of homebrewing provides you with a basic skill you can barter, sell, or exchange within a prolonged economic downturn. It’s important to point out here that learning to can foods also exposes you to the skill of fermentation. Many of these skills overlap with each other. If you harvest cucumbers from your garden, you can extend their usage by knowing how to ferment them into pickles.
Mechanics & Engineering
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, the old adage says, but what do you do when the one machine you rely upon the most breaks and you have nothing to replace it? What do you do when you suddenly need something manufactured but don’t know how to? Mechanical and engineering skills are critical. Many of us may remember the amazing ingenuity exhibited by our grandfathers to fix, repair, or innovate a brand new item to fulfill a need or make life easier. Our industrious ancestors used a single steam or diesel engine to do everything from washing clothes to pumping water to threshing crops.Tools are useless unless you know how to use them, and using them well can provide you with a skill in high demand in a prolonged economic depression. Whether you are making what you need, repairing something for someone else, or repurposing what someone else thinks is useless garbage, understanding mechanics and engineering is a life skill that can get you through the toughest of times. Start now to understand this useful skill. Don’t throw out that broken computer or fan. Take it apart and harvest the RAM chips and Solid State Drive or the copper wire. Understand how it works and if it can be fixed.
Medical Sciences
The medical sciences are another skill that can get you through another great depression. You don’t have to be a doctor, but you can easily become a certified EMT or certified in CPR. Every skill you learn in the medical sciences will not only increase your chances of survival in a variety of situations, but they will allow you to care for others. We have all seen the movies where the prisoner becomes the only person that can provide the right medical attention to save the captor chief’s children or spouse. The reason we have all seen that plot is because medicine is nearly archetypal. Caring for others and rescuing people from certain death is in our DNA.Whether you study herbal medicines or how to stop bleeding and prevent infection, every skill you learn in the medical sciences can pay the greatest dividend of all– life. You may never need to use skills to stop someone from choking or to revive them when they stop breathing, but knowing those skills will assuredly not be a waste. Learn how to suture, set a broken bone, clean and dress a wound, and so on. Preparing for the worst now can mean surviving when the worst comes.
Teaching, Childcare, Natal & Postnatal Care
The final skill we chose to cover is about kinder care: teaching, childcare, natal and postnatal care. Children aren’t born with user manuals. Ask any parent what they had to learn at the moment when raising their child. Knowing how to give birth to a child, becoming a lactation expert, caring for small infants and children, even teaching, require very specific skills. Fortunately, if you’ve ever had a child, you already know some of the skills.When the schools closed in 2020, many people began homeschooling or formed small community groups to share and exchange information. When both parents have to work to make ends meet, someone has to look after the children. Someone has to teach the children and productively engage their time. People aren’t going to want to leave their children with someone they don’t perceive to have these skills, but they’re not skills you can suddenly just declare that you have.ConclusionThat’s a quick overview of the 10 skills that will be in the highest demand during an economic depression. Beyond that, they are the skills you will most need during any economic crisis that lasts months, years, or even a decade. The nice thing about skills is that once you develop them, you can rapidly deploy them when the situation arises where you most need to. Whether hunting and fishing, foraging, cooking and canning, baking, sewing and knitting, homebrewing and fermentation, mechanics and engineering, or the care and education of children is your thing, you need to cultivate as many skills as you can now. It’s the most essential part of prepping, though it often gets overlooked as people prepare for food, water, and shelter security. But while those 3 basics of survival can be taken away from you or may run in short supply from time-to-time, skills can leverage your survival chances through an extended crisis. Skills not only increase your ability to survive through a disaster, but they also become a commodity to help you get what you need to continue to survive.It is hard to limit all the great skills out there to a list of the ones you think are the top 10, so we would love to hear what you think might be a useful skill during a prolonged economic depression. If you found this article informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.
The year 2020 has brought a global economic slowdown like we haven’t seen in generations. We’re already entered into a recession and there’s a very real possibility that the U.S. economy could enter into a lasting, deep economic depression. The chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, Mark Zandi, stated that a serious second wave of the coronavirus scientists are projecting this fall could push the economy into a deeper recession. He is optimistic that the country can avoid an economic depression, but he is reluctant to rule out the possibility since the risks are extremely high. And it’s not just the virus weakening our economy either. Government furlough payments and housing forbearance programs will soon come to an end. In addition, civil unrest in some cities is slowing down the economy, and to make matters worse, we’re at the start of a brand new hurricane and fire season. These issues by themselves are enough to hammer any economy, but with the uncertainties our nation will face this November during the elections and the potential fallout despite which candidate emerges victorious, our nation is facing compounding problems that only seem to pile on top of each other at a pace that is rapidly changing the economic playing field leaving many to wonder, could we tip over into another Great Depression? If so, what are some practical things you can do now to prepare?In this blog, we’ll cover 10 things you should consider purchasing to prepare you and your family for what may be coming next.In a recent blog, we discussed the things you need to know in order to prepare for an economic depression. In this blog, we’ll go deeper into the 10 things that you should consider purchasing before our economy potentially enters into a depression. Some aren’t very expensive and some can be costly, but we’ve tried to focus on items that will have the greatest use to you if an economic depression does occur. The Great Depression in America lasted nearly a decade, so it’s not unreasonable to conclude that should the country fall into a depression, the relative value of some items will increase greatly while the things we normally think of as having value will be worthless. Let’s look at the 10 things you may want to consider purchasing:
Land
The most expensive but most valuable asset during an economic depression is land. And it should not be just any land. It should be a property that can provide you with clean water and have the capacity to let you produce food. Food and water are going to be two of the most crucial resources that you will need during an economic collapse. Having land where you can plant and grow different crops and have access to clean water will ensure that food and water will be less of a problem during a depression. The land is also yours in name and it will be harder for other people to take it away from you, except through eminent domain or by force.An acre of land in the countryside is already a good property to start your homestead. Being away from the city is also good since you’ll be far away from population-dense areas in case riots or civil unrest takes place. It is important that when you purchase land somewhere, you should get to know the neighbors of your land. Get to know who they are and what they do. You basically need to know the community that you will be part of. It’s crucial that you have an idea of who they are to help you know if you can trust them or not. Also, know all possible safe routes that you can take to go to your land. You never know what will happen when disaster strikes. Several of the roads going to your land might be impassable, so having back up routes will help you out. Once you have land, you can safely store all of your emergency needs and supplies there. Just make sure to properly secure your supplies so they are not visible or obvious to others. Burying them on your land is one of the best ways to safely store and hide your emergency supplies.
Knowledge
A more affordable thing to acquire before an economic depression is knowledge. Whether you read a book or take a course, knowledge gained before a crisis occurs is a worthy investment. A dollar spent on learning now will pay you countless revenue in the future. Obtaining land for farming and gardening is one thing but knowing how to properly start a vegetable garden or farm is another. In fact, no tools in your survival kit are more important than your knowledge and skills. All of the tools that you have will only be as good as your knowledge in using them. This includes your land since its usefulness and overall potential will greatly depend on the skills and knowledge that you possess. This is why knowledge is the second thing that you need to acquire before the collapse. Knowledge about farming, gardening, and animal husbandry are things that will help you properly utilize your land. You should also learn how to hunt and forage in your area, which are key things to know for your survival. The more you know how to do things, the better your chances of surviving become. You should also be a student of history. An economic depression is not new, our country already experienced this in 1929. Read about how people survived and thrived during those times. Learn the skills that they had and use that information in your own preparation.It is also critical that you learn these new skills before the economy enters into depression. You might think that this is a waste of time, but it’s way better to acquire new skills and knowledge before you actually need them. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you have to learn quickly how to braid because you are in a dire situation and need a rope. Don’t wait to learn how to raise chickens before you need to corral them during a disaster situation and build a coop. Proper preparation for any crisis is done early and focuses on self-reliance and previously learned skills. Whether you read a book or take a course, knowledge gained before a crisis occurs is a worthy investment.
Money and precious metals
When banks fail, the paper currency we use for buying things becomes worthless and our society will start to use other forms of currency to purchase goods and services. Having funds outside your single bank account will increase your likelihood of having money resources to use during times of disaster. And one form of currency that will likely retain its value, even during an economic collapse, is precious metals. They are known as a good hedge against inflation and the collapse of currencies. One fortunate benefit of our highly connected world is that large sums of money can be transferred from a failed economy to a stronger economy. In a global economic depression, some countries will still fare better than others. Precious metals provide you a transferable commodity to shift your funds from failing systems to recovering systems. Minted silver and gold coins are precious metals that are likely going to retain value. Gold, in particular, performed well during previous stock market crashes.Looking at the crashes we’ve experienced before, gold usually rose in value as the stock market crashes. In another blog we’ve done before, we discussed using precious metals as a hedge against hyperinflation, which usually accompanies an economic depression. Here are just a few points about precious metals, they usually come in coins, ingots, bars, and rounds. Coins will have the most significant value since they hold the added value of their precious metal assay or purity, and the stamp of authenticity lent to them by their minted coin form. If someone gives you a lump of shiny silver metal and an equal amount of silver coins, you’re more likely to trust the silver coin than the lump of shiny metal. When it comes to acquiring them, I recommend using a bullion company. Not only can you purchase precious metals from them, but they provide added security since they can ship the purchase to you. I’ll post a link in the description section of the video and you can check it out if you want to learn more about precious metals. You may be able to set aside a few dollars every payday to help you build a usable reserve, hopefully, before an economic depression hits. Some preppers are recommending using bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as another form of currency you can use during a disaster. However, we don’t really see any practical application for virtual money during a grid-down scenario. That being said, if you feel that you can transfer your money out of one economy and to another, cryptocurrencies may be a way to do that outside of bank transfers. You can probably, also, have a few hundred dollars on PayPal or Venmo for use in a non-grid down situation, as an alternate form of payment.
Bulk staple food
Bulk staple foods are the second most important thing to have in your prepper supplies with water being the first. Use this time to wisely restock your preps. The first part of 2020 we saw a lot of store shelves run empty and we saw some disruptions to our regular food supplies. We have a great opportunity here to restock and increase our supplies of dried food, peanut butter, hygiene products, medicines, vitamins, and so forth. The first part of this year was, hopefully, the worst of what we will experience, but what if it was just a glimmer of the future?In the desperation of the great depression, some families turned to pickling and eating tumbleweed. You can avoid or stave off that level of desperation by replenishing and even increasing your supplies of staple foods. If you are new to prepping, here is your window of opportunity to quickly get up to speed with your staple food storage. If you’ve been prepping for awhile, this is an opportunity for you to address any shortcomings of your supplies you realized in the first part of this year and to increase your levels of stored foods according to what you currently feel is on the horizon. The more food you have stored up the longer you can survive through an extended economic depression.
Personal security items
Personal security items, such as guns, ammo, and other forms of personal protection that you prefer are things that you will also need to buy before the country experiences a depression. It is going to be almost impossible to purchase these things during a disaster. If you already own a gun, you saw how quickly ammo supplies disappeared in the first part of the year. Take advantage of this opportunity to restock your supplies. In a crisis you would have to find a store that is still open for business to buy these things, and you will likely have to deal with a shortage of supplies and very long lines. It is also better to deal with the background checks, even for ammo purchases in some states, prior to a disaster where things are still normal. Aside from purchasing a gun, you should also know how to properly use and care for them. Just like with a land, a gun is only as useful as your skills and knowledge on how to use it. Your knowledge of how to use guns and other self-defense items can be the difference between life and death during a grid-down scenario.If guns are not your preferred form of protection, there are other items you can get like knives, batons, pepper spray, and so on. You just have to make sure that you have the personal security item or items you need to protect yourself, your family, and your belongings. If a depression gets worse or it becomes prolonged, it’s not hard to imagine numerous people becoming desperate, especially if they are running out of options to survive. This could lead to civil unrest as people take matters into their own hands and do whatever they deem is necessary to survive the situation. So having the means to protect yourself and your loved ones is critical.
Medicine and medicinal plants
Medicines are another important item that you will need to purchase prior to an economic depression. This is especially true if you have a critical need for ongoing medication. Pharmaceutical companies can become unreliable during a crisis. You cannot be sure they will be able to supply pharmacies with the stocks of medicine that you will need. So stocking up on the medicine you will need is crucial. For this, you might have to ask your doctor to provide you a prescription that can allow you to buy in bulk. You should also check if laws in your city or state allow bulk purchases of prescription medicine and how many you can buy. You can also try purchasing from out of country suppliers just to get all of the medicine you will need. If buying bulk non-OTC medicines becomes an issue, you can also consider looking at less effective, but functional medicinal herbs. Many drugs derive from the concentration of the medicinal properties of plants. Should supplies of certain medications disappear, your only possibility might be medicinal plants.But even if you’re not taking ongoing medication, having a supply of basic medicines and other important health emergency kits are still important. You never know if medical care will be available during a disaster period, so having access to basic medicines in your home is critical. Have some supplies of basic medicines such as those for cough, fever, colds, headaches, stomachaches, and so on in your supplies. Make sure you check the expiration dates of the medicines you are getting. You would want to store these medicines for as long as possible without the worry of them expiring soon. Aside from medicines, make sure you also have a decent first aid kit with bandages of different shapes and sizes, safety pins, sterile gauze dressings, rolled bandages, disposable sterile gloves, tweezers, and more.
Denim, canvas, and cotton fabric
It’s also a good idea to stock up denim, canvas, and other durable fabrics. These items will be useful, especially if the economic depression drags on for years. Clothing manufacturers and retail stores are going to be businesses that won’t fare well during this period. Many stores and companies will likely go out of business, which means getting new clothes and apparel or even repairing them will be hard to do during this time. You can create clothes, bags, and other useful items with the denim and fabric that you have. Or you can use them to repair clothes or apparel that you have. The beauty of creating clothes and apparel or repairing them is that you can use that skill to barter for other items or supplies with other people. With clothing manufacturers closed, many people will be looking for other ways to get new clothes or have the ones they have repaired. As a child, it was common to have for my mother to put patches on the knees of my pants when I ripped them. She learned sewing from her mother which lived through tough times. My grandfather before his passing not that long ago would still repair clothing and rarely threw anything anyway. We live in a disposable world, but previous generations understood the importance of repairing and extending the life of their clothing.Even if you don’t know how to sew, stocking up on denim, canvas, and cotton fabric will be useful. You can still use these items to barter for other supplies. With retail stores closed, many people will likely resort to creating their own apparel or repairing their broken ones. You can use your stock of denim, canvas, and other durable fabrics as bartering items. You can barter them for other supplies that you will need. It’s easy to seal and preserve bulk yards of these durable fabrics. You can just place them in vacuum-sealed plastic and keep them stored for years, keeping their quality intact. A final note on cloth, add to your prepping supplies at least one pair of new blue jeans for each of your family members. For kids, purchase in larger sizes.
Hunting and fishing supplies
It’s no surprise that food is going to be one of the most sought after resources during an economic depression. The coronavirus pandemic has already exposed how fragile our food system is and that same system may suffer worse if a depression were to happen. This is why it’s also critical that you have hunting and fishing supplies in your home or bug out place. You need to be prepared for the possibility of our normal food supply chain being disrupted or disappearing altogether, and knowing how to fish or hunt can be the difference between you and your family starving or surviving. Even if you have a garden, a farm, and enough stocks of staple food, there’s no harm in having another way to acquire food to eat. You need to be prepared for everything that can probably happen, and having the supplies to hunt and fish ensures you and your family won’t starve to death in case something goes wrong with your other source of food.Many people during the Great Depression in the 1930s relied on hunting, fishing, and foraging for their survival. This is one of the reasons why many people during that time didn’t starve to death, despite the limited or even non-existent access to food for the majority of the population. You don’t need to have expensive and complete hunting or fishing gear stored in your home. Even a simple pellet gun or fishing line and hook are enough for you to fish and hunt for small game that you and your family can eat to keep from starving. As always, it is also important that you have the knowledge and skill to hunt, fish, and prepare your game properly. These tools and supplies become useless if you don’t know how to use them, so make sure you also acquire the knowledge and skill needed to fish and hunt properly.
A cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven
A cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven should be part of any preppers supplies. You might already have some pots and pans that you use for cooking and you think that is enough to help you cook and survive during trying times. That might be true to some extent, but many of the modern pots and pans that we see today are not really durable, break easy, and will not fair well after repeated cooking over an open flame. This means that you could find yourself without a good means to cook during a crisis. To prepare for that, you will need to have a cast-iron skillet or a Dutch oven. Cast iron skillets with lid and Dutch ovens are very strong and sturdy. From the stove top to the oven to open fires, you don’t have to worry about them breaking. One of the cast iron skillets I use at home is easily 100 years old. This type of cookware can last for many generations if properly maintained.What makes cast iron skillets strong and durable is the fact that they are made of a very dense metal, making them very tough and very hard. You may already have a cast-iron skillet in your camping supplies, but this may be a good opportunity to add another cast iron item to your supplies and practice cooking with them. It does take slightly longer to heat the cast iron, but once it fully absorbs the heat, it can become red hot without becoming damaged and will hold the heat for a long time. The dense metal used also provides steady heat, which can cook food more evenly. If it gets a little rusty, you just need to remove the rust, re-season the pan, and you can start cooking on it again.
Essential survival items
The final item in our list of things to buy before an economic depression is essential survival items. These items will have greater use for you, especially during a prolonged economic depression. One survival item that you will need will be a good water filter. We personally have a Berkey water filter with backup filters. Another survival item you will need is a durable pair of hiking boots. It’s important that you make sure they are really durable since it could be the last pair of shoes you might have to wear in a while. For processing wood that you can use for construction and in building a fire, you will need an axe. You will also need a way to start a fire, a portable shelter, some camping gear, multi-tools, pocket swiss knife, light sources, and more.To properly know if you are already prepared or not, try asking yourself if you could camp for a week, two weeks or three with your current supplies and equipment? Do you think you already have enough or are you still missing things you would need to have? You should also ask yourself if your camp is mobile to allow you to easily go to an area with jobs and resources. The reason why you need to ask these questions is that there is a real possibility that you could be homeless during an extended period of economic depression. As we said earlier, it is not impossible for your land to be taken away from you. Having the ability to camp out for a week or longer but be mobile enough to travel to different places where there are jobs and resources can be a crucial factor in making sure you and your family will survive a prolonged depression.ConclusionThe threat of an economic depression is very real and one way to properly prepare for it is to make sure that you have already purchased the items that you will need before it happens. These are critical items that will be harder to get once the country enters into a depression. From land to food to cast iron cookware, this is your window of opportunity to make sure you have the essential things you need before you need them. We can learn from the first few months of 2020 to resupply or bolster our supplies of essential things we will need in the future. When the pandemic hit, the surge of people rushing the stores and clearing everything out was an example of what could happen again if the economy takes a turn for the worse.
If you found this article informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.
Though the stock market continues to chug along despite a recent pullback, it continues to seemingly recover from even the worst news: a nation gripped in a pandemic with evidence of a potential resurgence, social unrest, and with record unemployment, the challenges we face seem to paint a different story. The Coronavirus pandemic has exposed how many countries are ill-equipped and unprepared to deal with a virus of this magnitude, it showed how vulnerable food supply systems are, and it revealed how fragile our economic systems can be. The biggest impact that the pandemic has had is on the global economy. Numerous countries have shut down borders, businesses, and their economies and ordered people to stay in their homes in hopes of containing the spread of the virus. In the U.S., the effects of this action were painfully felt in April 2020, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the country lost 20.5 million jobs.This resulted in an unemployment rate that ballooned to 14.7%, which is an increase of 10.3%. It’s the highest rate and largest one month increase in history (since data started being recorded in 1948). The country’s Gross Domestic Product also suffered, as it decreased at an annual rate of 5% during the first quarter of 2020, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. These numbers haven’t been experienced since the Great Depression. Is the economy teetering on the edge of collapse?With a new disaster or crisis seemingly occurring every month of 2020, it makes you wonder if we are hurtling blindly towards a financial collapse? In this blog, we will look at 5 indicators that reveal how and when things could get worse to hopefully give us insight into how we can best prepare for the uncertain future we currently face.
Stock Market Doesn’t Reflect Reality
One of the most obvious indications that there’s a recession or financial collapse on the horizon is the stock market. When the Great Depression began in 1930, one of the primary reasons for it was the stock market crash of 1929, which saw the worst declines(the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 24.8% on Oct. 29, 1929) in U.S. history and destroyed confidence in the country’s economy. There was broadsell-offin the stock market in the first quarter of 2020 (particularly in February and March) due to the uncertainty of the Coronavirus and how the measures to combat it will affect the economy. However, the sell-off was short-lived and the stock market is once again on the rise or is, at least, staying afloat. This is despite the many different statistics and data that show how the pandemic has affected the country like the 14.7% unemployment rate equaling 20.5 million jobs lost in April. So why is this the case? There are actually several reasons why the stock market is still performing well or at least why it hasn’t fallen off the cliff after all of the things that happened.One, the government acted quickly in ensuring the economy won’t just nosedive into a recession. Back in March, the CARES Act was signed into law, which is a $2 trillion federal stimulus package. The U.S. Federal Reserve also announced that they would engage in an unlimited asset purchase. They launched $700 billion worth of asset purchasing and also cut interest rates to zero. Though the initial response was negative, these policies have helped in greatlyeasing the negativeimpact caused by the shutdown to the economy because of the pandemic. These policies also increased market confidence and made people inclined to believe that the worst impact had already occurred and things would only get better from there. Another reason the stock market continues to perform well is that companies that aren’t directly affected by the Coronavirus, liketechnology companies, weren’t badly affected by the shutdown, hence their stocks continued to rise. This is seen in the performance of the Nasdaq, which is close to making new all-time highs. Companies that are directly affected, like airlines and hotels, continue to do poorly, so not everything is all positive in the stock market. It’s also important to consider that the market is a forward-looking indicator, which means investors are looking towards the future and are putting their money on companies that they think will do well or recover after this ordeal. This is why there’s an increase in money going to companies that are doing their business online since investors believe they’re the companies that will do well during these trying times.Another reason the stock market may be running contrary to the realities is that there really isn’t anywhere for investors to go with their money. The bond market is offering super low to no returns and with the uncertainty of employment, there isn’t a big demand for big-ticket items like houses and cars. So people are forced to keep their money in the stock market, especially since they don’t want to miss out on the possible returns they could achieve. Though this seems like a sign that good things are about to come, it’s critical that you stay cautious. Not all investors believe the worst is already behind us, Warren Buffet being one of them. It’s also critical to note that though the stimulus and asset purchases from the government can keep many companies afloat, this is only a short-term solution. In the long-term, companies will still need to have sales to keep their businesses running. With the uncertainty of employment, people might not be willing to make too many purchases once the government starts lifting the lockdowns. What you can do here is to be more active with your investments, especially the ones you put in the stock market. The real problem with the stock market, however, is that only 51% of Americans own stocks, and most of those stocks are in retirement plans or 401ks. These plans are mostly stagnant in the market to lessen the effect of volatility. While panic selling can still occur, typically this isn’t panic selling by fund managers, so it is definitely not part of the average American’s stock market activity.As an indicator of an economy’s health, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NASDAQ or any market index based on stock, isn’t really a good barometer of the overall health of the economy. So while markets remain up, despite the obvious gloomy news, we could still be hurtling towards a collapse.
Will the U.S. GDP get Worse?
The country’s Gross Domestic Product measure has contracted by 5% during the first quarter of 2020. This contraction marks the first time since 2014 that the U.S. GDP turned negative. It was also the largest drop that the country experienced since 2008, which shows how bad the contraction in the first quarter of the year. One of the main reasons for the contraction is the effects of the country’s response to try and slow down the spread of Coronavirus. The “stay-at-home” orders in March forced schools and many businesses to close their shops and lose revenue during this period. This resulted in 26 million people filing for new unemployment insurance claims during the same period and retail sales dropping by 8.7%. Services consumption also suffered, shrinking by 10.2%. This is a big problem for the U.S. economy since 70% of the country’s economic activity is based on consumer spending. Manufacturing output also dropped by 6.3%, the largest drop since 1946. Manufacturing, which accounts for 11% of the U.S. economy, was already struggling due to the trade war with China. The pandemic just made it worse. Many companies also decreased spending as business fixed investment decreased by 8.6%, the most since 2009. This is also a casualty of the trade war that was made worse by the pandemic. Durable goods orders also dropped and the biggest culprit is the decrease in orders for aircraft. These figures are concerning, but many experts believe that this will only get worse in the second quarter of 2020. The takeaway here really is that despite the high flying stock market, almost every one of the other indicators of collapse is down or near historical lows.In fact, even if the official figures for the second quarter haven’t been announced yet, the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official arbiter of recessions, declared on June 8, 2020 that the country has officially entered into a recession. Normally, a recession will be declared if the economy experienced 2 straight quarters of contraction. But that isn’t always the case and it’s really up to the NBER to determine if the country is indeed in a recession already or not. The committee said that “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, normally visible in production, employment, and other indicators. A recession begins when the economy reaches a peak of economic activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough.” Even if they don’t wait for an official figure, the latest estimate for the second-quarter GDP is very bleak. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta published that the estimated GDP for the 2nd quarter will be -48.5%. This declaration or recession has ended the U.S. economy’s longest expansion in history, which started in 2009 and lasted for 128 months or almost 11 years. Many experts, though, believe that the contraction won’t go beyond the second quarter, especially since the economy is once again opening up, which means businesses will also start to open.The unemployment rate for May 2020 decreased to 13.3%, down from the April high of 14.7%. This return to employment shows the hiring back of some key employees, but we would be mistaken to assume all employees at any business will be hired back. That leaves the unemployment rate still to be hovering at historic highs. The fact of the matter is, our country has already entered into a recession, and though many experts are saying that things might get better, those same experts also predicted previously that unemployment would worsen. This means that no one really knows what will happen in the next few months. It’s safe to say that we haven’t ever been in this exact spot before. Consumer spending continues to drop and plunged by 13.6% in April, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is the highest since the government started tracking it in 1959. This beats the previous high of 6.9%, which just came out last March 2020. This shows that even if businesses start to open, people might not be willing to spend money just yet.While the GDP may show little bumps, it clearly remains down, and further strain could force further negative forecasts and declines.
Economic Inequality Gaps
Another sign of a possible financial meltdown is the continued problem of income inequality in the U.S. The recent death of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed have once again put the spotlight on the perceptions of a racial divide and an inequality that is plaguing the country. This has been a problem for many decades already, but the income inequality gap has been increasing since 1970. This is further compounded along racial lines. The difference between the median household income between black and white Americans has grown from $23,800 in 1970 to $33,000 in 2018 (when measured in 2018 dollars). Wealth is also a problem as a 2016 Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances also shows that $17,600 is the median net worth of black households compared to $171,000 for white households– a staggering multiple of 10 times. An analysis by the Brooklyn Institute showed that this wealth gap is wider now compared to at the start of the century. The unemployment rate has not been kind to African-Americans as well, as the May 2020 jobless rate for black workers is at 16.8% while white workers are only at 12.4%. Growing income inequality is actually a good predictor of an impending financial crisis, according to a paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The paper demonstrated that “years of rising income inequality and persistently low productivity growth also sow the seeds for a crisis.” Recessions tend to be more severe and recovery slower if there are significant income inequalities.Another thing to consider with income inequality is that a majority of the people who don’t belong to the top 1% are usually envious of what the wealthy have, according to a 2019 article from Forbes. To try and keep up, these people will start borrowing money, which they will have a hard time paying back and use it to buy things to make them feel happy or satisfied. One example given was the Great Recession in 2007, where many people with low incomes took on subprime mortgages to buy houses. When they couldn’t afford to pay back, not only did people lose their homes, but many financial businesses tanked because of the uncollected debt. The Federal government even had to step in to bail out some of these banks so they wouldn’t go bankrupt. Millions of jobs were also lost during this period, which severely affected consumer spending. And as income inequality is becoming worse each year, it’s not hard to see that this could lead to another financial collapse. In fact, a 2019 article from the Washington Post mentions that the wealth concentration is once again returning to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties, which preceded the Great Depression.
The Pandemic Destroys Consumer Confidence
Probably the greatest indicator of a looming economic downturn is consumer confidence. As mentioned earlier that Consumer Spending accounts for 70% of the U.S. GDP. This means that as long as people are spending money and buying things, our country’s GDP will likely perform well. But people haven’t been buying things lately due to the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic and the government’s response to shutting down the economy. The Consumer Confidence Index chart of the last 7 years shows a nearly vertical drop in 2020. The main culprit for the decrease in spending was the drop in outlays on healthcare because dental offices closed down and hospitals postponed surgeries and non-emergency visits to focus on Covid-19. Spending on restaurants, food, and beverages, also decreased during this month. Though people ramped up their online spending, it’s not really enough to compensate for the loss of spending in other areas. These figures, together with the jump in the unemployment rate for the month, as well as the 20.5 million jobs lost, highlights how devastating the Coronavirus pandemic has been.Even if consumer sentiment improved slightly in May because of the stimulus programs that the government implemented, it might still not be enough to get people to start confidently spending more money. The pandemic also changed people’s buying behavior and this will likely continue even after the pandemic is gone, according to an article from Accenture. When it comes to buying things, people are now focused more on the basic necessities of life with personal health being the top priority. People are also more mindful about what they are buying, shopping for only what they need, being more cost-conscious, and focusing more on sustainable options. There is also an increase in demand for local products, and 46% of people who never worked from home previously are now planning to work from home more in the future. What this shows is that just opening the economy might not be enough to get people to start spending again. Businesses will have to adapt quickly to these new buying behaviors if they want to attract buyers to their products and services.
Civil Unrest Derails the Recovery
Civil unrest has erupted across the country following multiple videos of police brutality. Some of these crowds have led to violence and looting. This situation comes as the country is trying to jumpstart the economy following the devastating effects of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many businesses in different states are just starting to open up their stores after months of being closed down due to quarantine orders. But the opening was cut short as many businesses across different states are once again being forced to close down their stores, this time because of the looting and destruction, according to an articlefrom the Washington Post.The problem is that these small to medium businesses are already hit hard by the pandemic and the civil unrest is making it worse for them. This could result in more business closures and permanent job losses.Numerous financial experts have said that the looting and destruction will have a negative impact on the markets and could derail the economic recovery. One of the main issues is that these protests are sparking concerns of a second wave of infection. With many people gathered together and not practicing safe protocols, it’s not hard to imagine the Covid-19 virus could spread rapidly again. Experts just don’t know if the coronavirus will re-emerge in a wave in October, similar to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, or if it will slow smolder, ever-increasing for years to come. Without a doubt, however, the continued effects will drain and transform the economy. Many state governments are already reeling from the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic and the continued protests could push them further into the red. This could result in numerous government job losses, further worsening the country’s unemployment situation. Our country’s economy is in a very fragile state right now starting with the trade war with China and then the Coronavirus pandemic. Though there are some signs of a slight recovery and some government efforts working, that could all be for naught if civil unrest continues to be a problem.ConclusionThe Coronavirus pandemic has not only impacted our country’s healthcare system and our way of life but it also severely affected our economy. The Federal Government’s “stay-at-home” orders as a way to try and limit the spread of the virus had a severe effect on the economy. This caused the economy to grind to a near halt, which resulted in many businesses closing permanently and millions of job losses.This caused concerns that the country is heading towards financial collapse. We’ve looked at several indicators to see if this is the case and it, unfortunately, paints a horrible outcome. Only the stock market is not showing signs that a collapse is imminent but that is mainly because of the government’s policies, which makes investors confident about the market, and the Fed is running out of tools to keep the market throttled open. We would like to stress that you should not just wait for things to become better. To prepare for the possibility of an economic collapse, you need to be more self-reliant and be more active with your finances. Even if the stock market is staying afloat, consider also investing in precious metals, especially if you have the extra money for it as a means to shelter your finances. They will likely have more value if a collapse does happen.Though it does paint a gloomy picture, this doesn’t mean that a collapse is a foregone conclusion. Things could still turn around and become better again. Sales and purchases could still rebound with a vengeance, civil unrest could subside quicker than expected, and Americans could adjust to a new normal of living with Coronavirus. If these things happen, our economy will likely bounce back and could even find itself better than before with increased spending and more people purchasing big-ticket items that they held off on during disastrous times. What do you think will happen? We would love to hear what you think is going to happen based upon my reading of these indicators. Please leave your opinion in the comments below. We do read many of the comments and respond to them when we are able to–usually within the first hour of releasing the blog.
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We’ve done blogs in the past about books you should consider for your prepping library. From the past blogs, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback and further recommendations. We also have recently had a number of requests to do another blog for those who have newly come to the prepping community because of the coronavirus pandemic. With the events unfolding this year, we think more and more people are becoming aware that having some semblance of being able to take care of yourself if services or our infrastructure are compromised is more important than ever. Food shortages, lack of medical care, and a lack of personal safety are all possible realities not in the distant future but maybe as near as tomorrow. Apart from having items in your inventory like food, water, or medical supplies, knowledge is paramount. So, with that in mind, here are 10 books you should heavily consider having in your library to ensure you’ll have a hard copy with important information. If at any time you want to pick up any of these books, we’ll post links to each one in the description section and in the comment section below.
With hospitals fully dedicated to the fight against COVID-19 and a full stop to elective surgeries, we see how vulnerable the health care system in the United States really is. While we don’t recommend at all that you do surgery on yourself or your family members, in a worse situation when no medical professionals or facilities are available, this almost 700-page guide can walk you through the life saving medical procedures you need to know. From tracheostomies to tourniquets, from bullet wounds to high blood pressure, this book assumes you have little to no medical knowledge and walks you through the procedures you need to know when there is no help on the way. Hopefully, you will never need to use anything in this book, but studying up on medical procedures now is a key skill to have. Should a medical crisis happen, you don’t want to be unprepared, and you don’t want to be thumbing through this book at the moment of the crisis.
Our reliance on technology is definitely a weakness. Can you imagine if you didn’t have the internet while you were self-quarantined? Yet, even though the internet was designed so research institutions could communicate after adisaster or nuclear attack, any technology is susceptible to failure during a natural disaster. After even the smallest of earthquakes here in California, often all phone lines are busy as people call their friends and family to ask “Did you feel it?” In a much larger earthquake or another natural disaster, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that these critical technology connections could fail. Having hard copy, printed atlases, maps, and even aerial photographs could be a lifesaver if you’re forced to evacuate your area, need to find your way back home, or need to find sources of water in a grid-down situation. We recommend having these materials both in your library and in the trunk of the vehicle you use the most.
The pandemic revealed just how unreliable our food supply really is and how dependent and narrow our diets have become. When things initially hit, you saw how people rushed the stores which caused them to get emptied out. Our heavy reliance upon the harvest of the three big grains: soy, wheat, and corn, and the animals that we eat that are fed these grains as well, leave us dependent on a narrow food chain. Our ancestors were foragers. They knew the edible plants in their environment and they harvested them and incorporated them into their diets. Dandelions, Stinging Nettles, Gooseberries, nuts, mushrooms, and cactuses have many edible varieties. A good book on foraging that focuses heavily on your area or climate zone, can be a lifesaver. You don’t want to wait until a crisis hits to make a decision on whether a mushroom is an edible kind, so you should definitely read up on foraging and begin to identify the plants, even if you don’t eat them, so should you ever need to consume them you can do so safely. You will find that you’ve been walking by a cornucopia of edible plants. You’ll start to notice the abundance of foods in parks and on nature walks. You never know. You may become curious enough to try your hand at making Dandelion wine or Prickly Pear syrup or some other seemingly exotic food. At the very least, put a good book on foraging in your prepping library.
If you’re new to prepping you’ll find that there are quite a few books specific to surviving in the wilderness. That’s great, and we would recommend you have at least one of those books in your library in case you do find yourself in that environment. City Prepping covers prepping in all types of situations, but we like to sometimes focus on urban survival because 58% of Americans live in cities and urban environments. This book, Urban Emergency Survival Plan, is a good starter for the person who wants to be prepared for the future but may not have an acre of land to grow food or an underground bunker. There’s some practical advice in this book for the person who needs to shelter in place at home or who needs to bug out in a hurry to a safer environment.
If you don’t happen to own an acre of land, as many don’t, including me, you should still be aware of basic gardening techniques and maximizing what little space you do have. Balconies and even window sills can provide enough space sometimes to at least supplement food supplies. If you do have a yard or enough space for outdoor containers, All New Square Foot Gardening or The Backyard Homestead, are books you will want to add to your library and read before you need them. Growing and preserving your own food is relaxing and satisfying, but it also reduces your dependence on unstable food supply chains and stores. Again, as with all these books, you will want to read them before you need them. Knowing and preparing ahead of time is always stronger than thumbing through the book for the first time while surrounded by a crisis. We’ve been starting new garden beds in our new house we just moved to and trust us when we say, it’s something that takes to learn. Start now while you can.
If you want an exhaustive sort of prepping for dummies, The Prepper’s Blueprint is your must-have book. There’s a lot of really good information in here for anyone looking to get their head around preparedness and surviving disasters. This book even has a section on how to get ready for disasters that turn out to be much longer-lasting: economic collapse, long term power outages, and, yes, pandemics, to name a few. If you’re now looking for a thorough overview of prepping, this is a good book to read and you’ll want it around as a reference should the current situation worsen or be compounded by other disasters or social instability. As you discover you want to know more about preparedness, we would further suggest you explore any of the books in the Process Self-Reliance Series. It’s a good little series with books ranging from canning to urban homesteading to what to do when there’s no doctor to sustainable foods. There’s a lot of opportunity for deeper exploration of many of the topics covered in the Prepper’s Blueprint.
In the same vein as the Prepper’s Blueprint, but simpler to read and digest is this book: The Prepper’s Pocket Guide. We have been recommending this book for years to anyone who wants to begin lightly prepping. It has 101 easy things you can do to ready your home for a disaster. Some of it might seem a little simple to anyone who has been prepping for a while, but for anyone relatively new to prepping it will provide some good insight on practical things you can begin to do right now to prepare yourself to survive an uncertain future. This book starts with the basics and works its way up.
When you were social distancing and quarantined to your house, you may have stared at your pantry or kitchen cabinets and wondered if you could mix ketchup in water to make tomato soup. If you weren’t used to preparing your own meals prior to the pandemic, you definitely need to know how to cook. It’s a skill that’s essential to survival and the cornerstone of self-sufficiency. We like to print recipes from the internet and keep them in a file near my cookbooks, but you’ll also want to make sure you have a book like this one: Meals in a Jar: Quick and Easy, Just-Add-Water, Homemade Recipes. A high-stressed crisis situation is not the time to learn to cook or even to try and think of what meals to prepare. What we like about this book is that with meals already prepared in a jar, you can easily cycle through older supplies to make sure your stored foods are as fresh as they can be.
Prepping is about knowing what you need to know before you need to know it. While we hope you never are in a violent situation where you have to defend yourself or your home, it’s a good idea to have some knowledge of how to defend yourself. This book, Prepper’s Home Defense: Security Strategies to Protect Your Family by Any Means Necessary, is a thorough look at defending yourself and your home. It is very much written from the perspective that civilization has fallen and looters are coming, so some may find it a bit on the extreme side; however, we think having an awareness of the practical knowledge in this book would definitely help you if you ever find yourself in a truly bad situation.
If you found yourself going stir-crazy while on lockdown, you recognize the need to be able to escape in a good book. You can’t rely on the television or the internet to be your sole sources of entertainment. In a deeper crisis, these sources may not be available to you. We suggest that you have at least one or two books of fiction in your library, for those times where you are forced to wait a crisis out or, like with this pandemic, you’re forced to shelter in place. Put in your library a good spy thriller or a classic you’ve always wanted to read. You’ll thank yourself for the ability to escape a bit should you have to keep stable as a crisis rages on outside, around you.
Conclusion:So, that’s the 10 major books we would suggest, minimally, that you get in your prepper library. There are links in the article for you to check them out further. If you’re new to prepping because of this current pandemic, welcome, and hopefully these books will get you started in the right direction for the current crisis and any future crisis. If you’ve been prepping for a while, one of these books may be new to you or you may want to lend your copy of one of these books to a concerned friend or family member who is now glad you took prepping seriously. We have made other videos on prepping books for your library, so you might want to take a look at those for an even more in-depth look, but we wanted to make this lighter, 10 book blog for anyone dipping their toes in the water for the first time. We hope you enjoyed it.
If you found this article informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below. There are so many books out there, and I have only listed about 10 here. If you have a favorite, leave the title and author in the comments below.
Without a doubt, we live in an unprecedented time in our nation’s history. 2020 will be a year in history books that will assuredly show a time of upheaval, uncertainty, and hopefully change for the better. But at the moment, there are issues we’re facing that we should all be aware of. With protestors in the street during the day and looters and arsonists in the streets at night; Police, National Guard, and military forces deployed to protect businesses and buildings; Record unemployment, a pandemic, and growing food shortages creating desperation in a population; New and increasingly more militant faction groups springing-up every day; The U.S. government referring to its citizens as enemy combatants; Racial tensions boiling over; Citizens arming themselves in an attempt to protect themselves and their property; Armed militias seizing capital buildings and threatening legislators; Neighbor turning on neighbor; the question has to be asked: is the civil democratic society* of the United States on the brink of collapse? Is the America that our founding father Alexander Hamilton referred to as the “Grand Experiment” about to conclude by crossing over into a point of no return?
America isn’t a stranger to unrest. Over its 244 year history, it has seen civil unrest, world wars, civil wars, systemic racism against many races, and its full share of natural disasters. The challenges of the nation’s history are really too many to name. Each trial and tribulation has tested the country’s resilience, and each time America has emerged stronger– bruised, bumped, and battered– but still intact, still one nation.
In this video, we will examine the 5 warning signs we should be paying attention to in the United States which are “testing whether [this] nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Are we passing the tipping point, or will we find our way from the darkness of division to the light of unity around our common goals and values?
Divisions without calls for unity
Divisions without calls for unity indicate that greater conflicts are on the horizon. While America has seen its share of conflicts and divisions in the past–the worst, of course, being the Civil War–it has proven itself to be resilient, capable of healing itself over the long haul. Wounds heal with time, however, and the time for news of injustices, breaches of law, or even acts which might be deemed unAmerican took weeks to travel to the small town in America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Divisions may have festered over several decades, as in the conflicts between the North and the South before and after the Civil War, however, the citizenry was harder to mobilize and less driven to personal offense and outrage because of the speed at which information spread.
In contrast, today’s real-time posting and viewing of scenes of police brutality or peaceful protests turned to opportunistic looters, incites wide scale, instant outrage among the population. While a call to arms may have taken weeks or months in the 1800s, we see groups mobilizing efforts in a matter of hours and coordinating their efforts, directing their members via the same electronic connectivity.
This lightning fire of our connectivity is fueled with the cynicism and outrage of many. Where we might have had somewhat benign discussions about political differences of opinion at a family barbeque before, the anonymity of the internet emboldens people to express any ugly thought they may have. To see this in real-time, simply view any comments thread for any news article on the internet. Though I’m not espousing any particular political idealogy or proposing any solution other than to prepare yourself, even the comments thread of this blog will likely demonstrate the deep divisions this country faces.
In the past, despite the divisions, Americans have been able to find their way to a common ground. There has always been a shared voice calling for unity that was louder than the divisive voices. The hatred of oppression or authoritarian powers overseas or the communist threat around the world or whatever common enemy or common aspiration we faced, united us in a common voice. In the current climate, however, there are few calls for unity and much stoking of the fires that divide us further. The Insurrection Act of 1807 and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 have the years associated with them because they were established out of a need in that year. Will there be a peace restoring act of 2020? Out of the unity of Congress, these acts were passed to restore a sense of peace, but with a divided Congress and bellicose President, are we now too divided to find a common unity?
Deepening divisions with parties in opposition and not seeking a unifying dialogue is the first sign that our democracy may be teetering on the edge.
Potential economic collapse
The second sign that the U.S. democratic society may be on the verge of collapse is the potential economic collapse that we are facing. The global GDP has significantly contracted. Markets and borders have closed. Some farmers find themselves unable to bring their products to market. Manufacturers around the globe have scaled back their production altogether. A relentless pandemic has evaporated consumer confidence in BTIs — Big Ticket Items– indicating a deepening recession, hyperinflation, and a looming economic depression.
As the Federal Reserve runs out of mechanisms to control the economic slide and the markets reel to the point of inverting themselves, as we saw with oil just two months ago, where barrels dropped to negative numbers, we have to wonder if we have the leadership in government or industry to lead us back to economic prosperity.
Other countries that have experienced such a decline have slid into oligarchies like the former Soviet Union or complete chaos like Venezuela. Democracies, however, have for the most part been able to correct themselves. The list of failed democracies is confined to a handful of startups that never took root or countries that morphed into autocratic rule. Never has a country with as long of a democratic history and as much collective power as America failed. The desperation of an economic collapse and a suffering population could move America to a more autocratic rule, could clip the wings of democracy, and clear a path for the destruction of the underpinnings of our democracy.
A deepening economic crisis in America could bring us closer to the brink of collapse.
Economic inequality gap growing by the day
The third significant sign to watch for is a widening of the economic inequality gap. While millions of unemployed Americans lose their comforts and watch the millionaires and billionaires of the world continue to increase their profits, could the disparity foment a revolution?
Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates and worth 17 billion dollars, ominously warns that there’s about to be an uprising in America, spurred by the widening wealth gap. What keeps him up at night is knowing that the rich and elite fare the worst when the pitchforks come out. He cites shrinking wages, the income/wealth/opportunity gap widening, and Americans earning less and dying younger as the three main reasons violent revolution is, at least, imaginable. He writes, “Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by the disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and, in the government, that manifests itself in the form of populism of the left and populism of the right and often in revolutions of one sort or another.”
He indicates that the staggering gap between the haves and the have-nots is 100 percent not at all due to “evil rich people doing bad things to poor people” or “lazy poor people and bureaucratic inefficiencies”, but “how the current capitalist system is now working.”
An increasingly desperate population along with a widening perception of inequality could directly stoke the fires of revolution and quickly dismantle a fragile democracy.
Food and shelter insecurities on the horizon
Food and shelter insecurities further exacerbate the growing threats to America’s democratic structure. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who influenced some of the founding
fathers, and lived just short of being a witness to both the French and American revolutions, famously said about the tensions leading up to those events that “When the poor have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich!”
With food and housing insecurities creeping like a specter over the economy, Americans will turn in two directions– self-reliance or self-opportunity. Self-reliance is the prepper’s path, but the majority of people, sadly, will seek to obtain what they need to survive by force and guile. We’ve already seen this in the opportunistic looting which has accompanied the otherwise peaceful protests.
As governments seek to protect businesses and to protect rich benefactors, authoritarian martial law declarations will further drive a wedge between citizens and government. As Americans increasingly perceive their country as protecting one class of people at the expense of the general population, again, democracy and its freedoms can unravel. So the desperation of Americans for secure sources of food and shelter is another warning sign to gauge whether our society is on the brink of collapse.
Will the election in November even happen?
Perhaps the biggest indicator in the future, however, is the November 2020 elections. With a President already casting dispersions on the integrity of elections, mail-in-ballots, and voter fraud, will he accept defeat if the opposing party is elected? With voter suppression and gerrymandering efforts seeking to override the will of the people gripped in an economic depression and a compounding pandemic, will American citizens accept a second term? Regardless of the outcome of the election, there is, at least, the possibility that it won’t happen at all.
If the pandemic worsens, civil unrest increases, or large scale voter fraud is implied or proven, the election could be postponed or canceled at a state or federal level. This would immediately, because of the Twentieth Amendment, cause a Constitutional crisis. As Congress, the President, and the judicial branches struggled to find a solution to that Constitutional crisis, they would be forced to work together while a nation and a world remained uncertain as to who was actually in charge anymore. So, again, protests, riots, looting, and military intervention could supplant democracy and bring our democratic society to a point of collapse.
Whether our democracy will survive an extended period of tribulation remains to be seen. It has before, and it may well again, but the pressures of a desperate populace with immediate, electric communications and flaring opinions, and the lack of a unifying set of voices, deepen the divisions. Potential economic collapse looming in the forecasts, increasing food and shelter insecurities, and a widening economic inequality chafing the populace perceptions, can all lead to greater civil unrest. And with an election 5 months away that is already proving to be the possibly most contested, challenged, and disputed in our country’s history, can our great nation’s democratic society endure. Watch for these signs and insulate yourself by becoming more self-reliant. Prepping is about increasing your self-reliance. Governments do survive. Some governments do change. As Abraham Lincoln said, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.” It’s also our responsibility, then too, to do everything in our power to preserve it.
If you found this blog informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below. I do read many of the comments and respond to them when I am able to.
As always, please stay safe out there.
*A Constitutional Republic is a form of democracy. “The United States is not a direct democracy, in the sense of a country in which laws (and other government decisions) are made predominantly by majority vote. Some lawmaking is done this way, on the state and local levels, but it’s only a tiny fraction of all lawmaking. But we are a representative democracy, which is a form of democracy.”
Volokh, E. (2015, May 13). Opinion | Is the United States of America a republic or a democracy? Retrieved June 12, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/13/is-the-united-states-of-america-a-republic-or-a-democracy/
Masked agitators smashing windows and inciting riots, organized groups putting wood on fires to burn stores, armed individuals taking control of capital buildings, protestors smashing windows and fanning fires, racial tensions, police firing rubber bullets and canisters of tear gas, the National Guard mobilized to protect citizens, vitriolic exchanges between the federal government, the state government, and local law enforcement, scenes of police brutality and the absence of police presence, police stations burning, a pandemic gripping a nation, and the desperation of unemployment at historical highs…these aren’t scenes from a futuristic movie of a dystopian society. These are scenes from this week in America, and as violent confrontations increase and expand like wildfires from their point of origin, it’s not a question of when martial law will be established, it’s a question of how it will be established in your community. Can you protect yourself from civil unrest and armed government overreach? Can a democratic society remain free much longer under such tremendous, violent pressure? Are government lockdowns inevitable, imprisoning you in your home? How much longer will your home even be safe?
In this blog entry, we will examine the multiple circumstances that will lead to a formal declaration of martial law and what you can do now to protect yourself. Even before the more formal declaration, however, it is important to understand that martial law can come in many forms and can be established without even a formal declaration. Armed police, National Guard, the military, even bands of controlling militias or armed citizens can bring about the same effect as martial law and can threaten your freedom and even your life. As a prepper, my primary concern is to look at the horizon and help you determine how and what you need to be prepared for. While some may want to see some political slant in this blog, know that there is not. As an observer of the current conflicts, I merely strive to extrapolate out the possible immediate effects which can threaten your safety and hope to provide you with a few measures to help keep you and your family safe.
In Response to Protests and Violence
With that caveat, the first most obvious way that a formal declaration can come about is in response to protests and violence. Historically, conflicts have usually been symmetrical in nature. That is to say that it was relatively clear that one side held a belief they were fighting for and the other side sought to maintain the peace and some semblance of the status quo. What we’re facing right now in America is asymmetrical divisions that don’t hold clear definable stances. There is a form of chaos as divergent parties sow division and spark conflicts that can easily spin out of control into larger, more wide-scale forms of insurrection.
Autonomous activist groups, armed militia groups seizing capital buildings and threatening lawmakers, ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and deeply divided political factions all tout the banners of their cause, but function to divide and stoke chaos. Though they may proclaim their motives are pure, many within these organizations are truly only interested in the destruction of the established order. A well documented and long time goal of white nationalists, for instance, has been to spark a race war. The Boogaloo/Blue Igloo/Blue Luau movement formed through the internet in 2019 has at its agenda the armed resistance of what they perceive is a tyrannical government. They are actively agitating to bring about a civil war.
ANTIFA, for instance, has a very anti-capitalism stance. Many of these groups are armed, radicalized, and coordinating efforts to sow chaos and destroy the stability in society. The bad news is that they’re doing a pretty good job right now of creating conflict, and though they may have vastly different motives and allegiances, they’re fighting alongside each other.
The state and federal governments are forced to respond to violence. There are two measured approaches in that response. The first is a call for unity and cessation of the violence, but with deep divisions between local, state, and federal authorities and some of those same authorities stoking the conflicts through their conflicts, action, or non-action, calls for unity fail to have any substantial effect. The second approach is to lock down and enforce order through armed forces. Whether those are local police, National Guard, or federal troops, it depends on the circumstances and who ultimately can control the conflicts, but they’re all martial law, even without a formal declaration. In the absence of any of the government methods of establishing control, you can expect armed individual groups to maintain control over pockets of cities. As those groups conflict with one another like a type of gang warfare, the fires of chaos continue to spread.
So, the government’s response to protests and violence is the most rapid and most likely possibility for the establishment of martial law.
To “Protect” Public Safety
Even with conflicts many miles away from our homes in faraway cities, martial law can be established in your area to “Protect” public safety. As these conflicts spread into other cities across the country, governments will act to ensure that their populations are safe. In an abundance of caution, police presence can be significantly stepped up. Curfews might be established to ensure peace at night. Everyday citizens might be stopped, questioned, investigated, or detained as possible agitators. Neighbors could turn on neighbors quite easily in such vitriolic times.
Under the guise of protecting public safety, martial law can easily creep into place over any population. And what happens when armed militia groups decide to take “public safety” into their own hands. Small, roaming bands of armed citizens can easily take the law into their own hands. The result of just two armed citizens taking the law into their own hands resulted in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia. A few armed “do-gooders” unversed in the law and constitutional rights but fully believing that they are protecting the larger community can spark wide-scale violence. An even larger, more organized and well-armed group threatens the authority of the local police. Police actions to check compliance of an armed group could lead to even further conflict and violence in the street. Knowing that violence could stem from an armed citizenry, governments under the guise of maintaining public safety could establish curfews or laws that further agitate the population. One thing can lead to another in a cascading effect and martial law can easily be established in even the most seemingly peaceful community.
Already amidst a pandemic, and with violent protests in the streets, consider how the perceived need to protect public safety might be used as an excuse for martial law were any natural disaster to compound the problem. A hurricane, torrential rain flooding an area or breaking dams, an earthquake, or fires raging out of control. Any of these add fuel to the existing conflict and provide opportunities for agitators or increased law enforcement. Protecting public safety is a broad term for the suspension of rights, so be aware of how conflicts can compound the need to protect the public.
In Response to Federal & State Conflicts
The third way martial law can easily be established is in response to federal and state conflicts. Historically, the United States has had pretty clear definitions of power between local, state, and federal governments. The federal government has respected the state’s rights to deal with its problems until those problems were beyond their control. Today, these levels of government are deeply divided. The federal government routinely calls into question the state Governor’s authority. State governors routinely criticize federal overreach. Deep in an election year, as the President sows the seeds of contesting election results, and as states amidst a pandemic seek to ensure mail-in voting rights for its citizenry, a potential powder keg is being established. Regardless of any election outcome, the potential spark from a protest turned violent could easily lead to martial law. It’s not unimaginable to even visualize these festering and brewing divisions leading to a full-blown civil war. It’s odd to say that since that seemed like such a distant possibility just a few years ago; however, the lack of a federally orchestrated call for unity and increasingly more volatile pockets of civil unrest make a larger civil war possible.
Even without something as extreme as a civil war, as states seek to assert their rights to keep their populations secure under a constant barrage of federal criticism, it’s not unreasonable to assume that some states will seek to “go it alone” and further exasperate faction groups of their citizens. The federal declaration of a national emergency, however, gives the federal government authority to establish martial law. This can assuredly deepen the divisions between state and federal governments.
When the President tweets “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” shooting occurs in a martial law situation. So, it isn’t unreasonable or even hard to imagine that martial law and federal overreach is knocking at the door. While I am not striving to present any particular political view, any reasonable person would agree that the divisions between local, state, and federal governments have not been greater in our lifetimes. As these divisions become greater, without any clear call for unified efforts, the tug-of-war of power can easily trample over citizen rights and security. Martial law looms over even the seemingly safest of areas.
To Weed Out Agitators
The fourth way martial law can easily be established is by any enforcement agencies’ efforts to “weed out agitators.” We see glimmers of this in the incident in Waco Texas, the shootout at Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Bundy standoff. As governments make pre-emptive moves against radical groups in an attempt to seize weapons or thwart possible nefarious plans, they open the door to a potential backdraft of armed citizen response. Whether the perceived threatening group is radicalized or jingoistic matters not at all. In an attempt, for instance, to make sure protestors are not armed, could they stop and search everyday citizens merely caught in the same proximity of the protest? How would an armed member of one of the earlier mentioned groups respond to this detainment? How would his/her peers react? How would a normally law-abiding citizen react to a violation of their 4th amendment rights?
In any of those scenarios, the exertion of government authority can lead to a larger conflict and to the government’s need to establish martial law. Law enforcement’s goal is to get ahead of potential conflicts. Imagine if a homemade bomb similar to the one used in the Boston Marathon bombing were to detonate in a crowd of protestors or in a group of police officers. The resulting reaction could immediately lead to weeks of multiple arrests, illegal searches, and even armed conflicts. As law enforcement casts it’s dragnet and rounds up the usual suspects, a form of martial law is suddenly the reality without even a formal declaration.
What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
This all paints a very grim picture, I know. I wish there was a more promising and rosier world we were looking at, but there isn’t really a glimmer of perceivable de-escalation or calls for unity visible in the immediate future. That’s not to say we won’t get through this. We have seen conflicts and civil unrest before, and our country is founded on strong roots. As a prepper, there are things you can do now to encourage your safety should things continue to spiral out of control.
Move Away From Danger
Review Your Home Security
Prepare for Extended Lockdown
Know Your Bug-Out Routes & Scenarios
Stock Your Food & Water
Avoid Expressing Your Politics
Don’t Go Out at Night & Avoid Crowds
Be the Gray Man
Move away from dangerous or potentially dangerous situations. Trying to get a better view of an amorphous and potentially exponentially increasing conflict can easily lead to you being swept up into the conflict. If you see someone smashing windows, don’t stop to blog it on your cell phone. Instead, immediately move in the opposite direction and don’t stop moving until you are far away from any chaos, even if this means making a circuitous route to your home base. It’s easy to think that you won’t be caught up in what you are seeing because you are one of the “good guys,” but in the fog of conflict, you are an unknown entity. You’re better served to get out of the area.
Prepare for an extended lockdown. As conflicts escalate and continue, you may need to spend an extended period in the safety of your apartment or home. Review and inventory your prepper supplies. Make sure to order online or shop for any items you may be missing. Prepare now before you find yourself in a desperate situation. Stock your food, water, and any medicines you may need for at least three weeks and longer if you are able. It’s possible that while violence or martial law spirals out of control outside, you can still be safe by bugging-in.
Don’t go out at night and avoid any large gathering crowds. Agitators are emboldened in the darkness and law enforcement knows this. Going out at night because it is quieter could result in you inadvertently stumbling across an agitator’s nefarious plans or law enforcement’s scrutiny as they seek to be hyper-vigilant.
Review your home security. Make sure your locks are working and your personal safety equipment is ready. Should conflict come to your doorsteps, make sure you have some level of security to keep safe. And, if you are unable to maintain the safety of your area, make sure you all know your bug-out routes and scenarios.
If fires are raging in a neighboring apartment building and fire and police can’t get there safely, you may have to flee with the supplies you can carry to a safer environment. Form a safety pact with nearby friends and family. If your location is compromised, you could bug-out to their location and vice-versa. These small partnerships can help you by making sure you’re not completely alone in a growing crisis.
Avoid expressing your political views, loyalties, or group affiliations. While it might be tempting to show up at a peaceful protest to show your solidarity, with evidence that agitators are active at these gatherings, it simply isn’t advisable. I do believe in the democratic process, however, so do please register to vote and call your lawmakers. Loudly proclaiming your affiliations in an amorphous crowd, however, during a growing conflict could make you a target from any number of directions. If you’ve ever seen a small fight turn into a large brawl, you’ll know why it’s important to think like the gray man. Can you disappear into the crowd and escape to safety? Can you blend into the background and be overlooked? I have another blog and video on the 3 Rules to Become A Gray Man.
These are, without a doubt, difficult times. Historically, we have, as a country, faced divisions and conflicts like this before. The Tulsa Race Massacre of the 1920s, the Chicago Riots in 1968, even the Minneapolis truck strike of 1934, conflicts will always exist in some form. They can become violent, and they can lead to declarations of martial law. Regardless of the formal declaration, forms of martial law through increased armed enforcement and proactive policing can lead to greater conflict.
I sincerely hope that we will see a positive resolution to the current conflicts we face, but it is imperative that you take measures now to prepare for extended and deepening conflicts in the future. Hopefully, cooler heads and level, steady leadership will douse the rising flames, but we have to prepare as if it may struggle to do so. For a deeper analysis of even more scenarios that could bring about martial law, please take a look at my blog “5 signs martial law is coming.”
If you found this blog informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below. I do read many of the comments and respond to them when I am able to.
Governments issuing orders to shelter in place and restricting movement, the continued threat of both domestic and foreign terrorism when a nation is caught in the vice grip of a pandemic, nuclear dirty bombs and rogue nations, cyber-warfare forcing a grid-down or financial collapse, and artificial intelligence rendering human thought irrelevant to its calculations are all threats to our future safety. They’re manmade threats that increase in their catastrophic effects because of the already omnipresent threat we are realizing of the pandemic. Is an apocalyptic end of days merely a combination of threats we should already be aware of and working as a global society to eliminate?
Barring global cooperation and what seems like an uncontrollable slide into further decay, how can we prepare to survive and thrive in a post-man-made catastrophe world?
In part 1 of this 2-part blog series, we looked at disasters that are likely to occur naturally because we live on this planet. Threats like hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and pandemics are catastrophes that happen naturally, and we can’t prevent or avoid them. We also included natural threats that may be intensified because of humans like climate change and food shortages.
The last threat discussed in part 1 was civil unrest and civil war, which introduced you to man-made threats. These man-made threats are the items we’ll discuss for part 2 of this blog series. We will look at the probable man-made threats that we possibly face in the immediate future. Knowing these probable disasters will help us greatly in our preparation. We will know what we need to prepare for and what priorities we need to focus on to increase our odds of survival.
So, let’s continue with the next point in this 10-part series.
Government Overreach
One of the main roles of democratic governments is to protect their citizens at all times. We talked about civil unrest in part 1 and how a government’s natural response to curb it is declaring martial law. Though that response might, under some circumstances, be necessary, some governments tend to overreach their authority and implement draconian policies for the sake of “protecting its citizens.” This is not unusual and the world’s history has many examples of government overreach. One example is the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s ability to invade privacy, override due process, and punish dissent, as a response following the 9/11 attacks. But the supposed temporary measure is still largely in effect to this day, almost 2 decades after that terrorist attack.
This Coronavirus pandemic is raising concerns about government overreach. An article from Public Radio International said that “under such circumstances, history has shown there is a very fine line between protecting citizens and eroding their civil rights — and that line can be exploited in times of great uncertainty.” One example given in the article was when the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the country’s security service to use cellphone data to identify citizens that need to be quarantined. Mass surveillance is being proposed and implemented in many countries to track and identify infected people. In March 2020, the U.S. government sought the help of tech giants in Silicon Valley including Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, Twitter, and IBM. The government asked for assistance in tracking the outbreak and to prevent the dissemination of false information. The White House wanted assistance to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and harmful hoaxes by obtaining intelligence on citizens before potential hoaxes went viral. Though it is important to keep track of the virus to stop it from spreading and keeping misinformation in check, this is still a bit concerning since it gives the government an ability to censor and control information, misinformation, and propaganda.
Many experts believe that implementing stricter policies during a pandemic is necessary. This is especially true if citizens are too stubborn to follow even basic precautionary protocols. However, there should still be a fine line between what’s appropriate and what’s overreaching. In some ways, when the citizenry protests against even basic government measures or spreads willingly or unwillingly conspiracy theories, they open the door for governments to step in and regulate the masses further. This always leads to government overreach. This threatens your security as the government’s attempt to minimize the threat of its own citizenry.
Terrorism
Terrorism is another man-made threat that we are probably going to face in the immediate future. But this threat is not new. Terrorism had been a problem for our society for hundreds of years already. From the Guy Fawkes Gun Powder Plot of 1605 to Carlos Jackal, to the atrocities of 9/11, and the Boston bombing, the world has frequently suffered at the hands of those who would desire to inflict terror on an innocent population, and this is going to continue. from lives lost, terrorist attacks also bring the possibility of government overreach. As previously discussed, the USA Patriot Act was a result of the 9/11 attacks. Terrorists could also cause more damage if they were to target critical areas like our power grids and food supplies. This could compound the threat further, resulting in a higher and more prolonged death toll.
With terrorism likely to continue being a threat to us, just knowing it is going to be a continuous problem is not enough. We will need to have a plan to ensure our survival. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness conducted a series of studies and showed that 72% of Americans are anticipating future terror attacks. However, less than 50% have an emergency plan for themself and their families. After terrorist attacks like 9/11 and the Boston bombings, people are left wondering what they can do to keep their families safe. One of the main things you can do is to work together with your community. An article from the Metropolitan Police in the UK said that communities defeat terrorism. This means being vigilant in your neighborhood and reporting any suspicious activities or things out of the ordinary that you hear or see can help to keep you safe. People in stationary vehicles keeping an eye on a building or structure, people using recording equipment, including camera phones, and seen making notes or sketches of security details, or someone who is suspiciously paying close attention to specific entry and exit points, stairwells, hallways, or fire escapes could all be planning for future terrorist attacks. You should also know what your community’s emergency plans are in case a terrorist attack happens.
You should have an emergency communication plan with a relative or friend who lives far from your area, so they won’t be affected by the same disastrous event. You also need to establish a meeting place for you and your family in case you’re all separated and rendezvousing at home isn’t a possibility. Plan multiple escape routes out of your urban environment, should you need to escape your location. Find a place that is safe and be prepared to bug out to a rural location or to shelter in place.
Nuclear Attacks
In the nuclear age, the threat of nuclear war or nuclear bombs will always be present. Even if countries are hesitant to use their nuclear arsenal because of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory and the automation of nuclear counter-strikes, their nuclear arsenal can still be a problem if the country falls apart or they become overly corrupt or autocratic. Collapsing countries are also at risk of losing their nuclear inventory, and criminals might take advantage of the situation and steal nuclear weapons for use or resale. Aside from nuclear weapons, we are also in danger of dirty bombs. These are man-made bombs that combine conventional explosives, like dynamites, with radioactive materials. They are not as destructive as actual nuclear weapons, but they are very disruptive, especially if you consider their impact once it detonates. If dirty bombs were used to take down the World Trade Centers during the 9/11 attack, it would have killed thousands, and the dust smoke that engulfed the surrounding area would have been radioactive, affecting many more Americans for years into the future. The radioactive poisoning won’t kill immediately, but it can cause long-term health risks like cancer. The cost would also be more devastating since it would have to include cleaning up the radioactive materials. The affected area could also be uninhabitable for decades.
Though a dirty bomb can be disruptive, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing you can do to prepare for it. According to an article from Slate, one of the crucial things you need to do is to make sure you don’t panic. The chances of being exposed to a harmful dose of a radioactive substance are very slim, even in the worst-case scenario, if you remain calm. Panicking during this period will only make the situation worse. If you find yourself within the vicinity or in the immediate path of dust clouds from the explosion, stay indoors and close all windows and turn off air conditioners and cover ventilation systems. If you happen to get exposed, take a shower, and safely dispose of your clothes and shoes. It’s also crucial to have a battery-powered radio that you can use to listen for updates. You also need to know where the shelters are in your area. You never know when you need to evacuate your home and go to a shelter, so knowing ahead of time where it is will likely be critical. Again, you should prepare in advance a “bug out” bag for you and your family. And, as mentioned earlier, know all the possible escape routes you can go to in case there is a blockage or if one route is unpassable. A physical, paper map of your area and a compass will also be helpful in case you get lost.
Cyber-warfare
Another threat that we are likely going to face in the immediate future is cyber-warfare. This doesn’t seem like much of an immediate problem since not having access to the internet might not seem too bad or getting individual credit cards hacked is more of an individual problem and a nuisance. But cyber-warfare is not just about losing internet connection or getting credit card information stolen. One form of dangerous cyber-warfare is using malicious software to destroy critical infrastructure or even nuclear processes. Hackers infiltrate a system and remain undiscovered by launching their malicious code in critical computer systems. Stuxnet was one such attack on nuclear fuel refining centrifuge systems. The code was designed to sabotage the centrifuge refining of uranium while showing normal operating conditions to the facility monitors. It has since been proven that Chernobyl, an explosion at a nuclear power plant over 30 years ago that has left large swathes of land uninhabitable to this day, was a result of one simple miscalculation and process in the plant’s operation. Another form of cyber-warfare is the Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. In this type of attack, hackers overload and overwhelm a server so it won’t be able to respond to legitimate requests. A DDoS attack on our grid, could create blackouts across the country, and easily launch the country into chaos. I did an in-depth blog and video on how cyber-attacks can bring our nation to its knees. I also provided some tips on what you can do to prepare should those events happen. I’ll post a link to the blog in the description section and I encourage you to watch it to learn more about the dangers of cyber-warfare and how you can protect yourself from it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The last threat of our top ten is often viewed as a future existential threat. However, this doesn’t mean that we should not learn more about it and prepare. This threat is Artificial Intelligence or A.I. As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, more and more businesses are leaning towards automation. This means that they are leaving certain functions and responsibilities in the hands of Artificial Intelligence. One example is self-driving vehicles. Facebook is already using AI, as it ranks and censors posts. So, how is this a threat to us? An article from The Conversation describes AI as something that is “particularly good at any task that requires an enormous amount of repetitive processing.” If this sounds like the job that you are currently doing, then you should make your preparations since AI could start performing your responsibilities. Relying too much on AI is also dangerous since its programming is only as flawless as the people who programmed it.
But AI presents a far greater threat than just our livelihoods or the danger of over-reliance. One of the biggest threats that world-renowned billionaire and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk fears is Artificial Intelligence. “The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads,” Musk said. He fears digital super-intelligence, which is when an AI that possesses intelligence that far surpasses that of the brightest and most gifted human minds thinks without the controls and constraints of humans. Many experts in the field dismiss Musk’s fears, but he argues that it’s fundamentally flawed to think that there won’t be an AI that is going to be smarter than any person on the planet. The issue with this is can that smartest machine be controlled? As the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said, “one can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” This might all sound far-fetched, but as AI continues to improve and develop at a rapid rate, it’s not hard to imagine digital superintelligence happening soon. Some of the leading minds already view it as a threat, and that should be good enough for us to consider it as well. Many things that appear in movies become the horrors of the future. Is it unreasonable to think a Terminator movie’s Skynet may be in our future?
But there are ways to prep against AI. Realize that every skill you have, from baking to gardening to building water purification systems, builds your skillset against AI and increases your chances of survival should AI make a decision without calculating your life into it.
As we conclude this 2-part blog series, we tackled the man-made threats that we are likely to face in the immediate future. Starting with government overreach, which is something that is already happening in many parts of the world, including the U.S., due to the Coronavirus pandemic. As governments grapple to contain the virus, they have implemented drastic measures that hamper certain liberties and freedoms that people enjoy. Though they claim it is for the greater good, there is a fine line between protecting citizens and eroding civil rights. The second threat, terrorism, will likely continue to be an issue, and we must be always prepared for it. Another disaster that we need to prepare for is a nuclear threat. As we continue to live in the nuclear age, the possibility of a nuclear war or a dirty bomb attack is always going to be there. Knowing what to do before, during, and after a radioactive attack is very important to ensure you and your family’s survival.
Cyber-warfare is another immediate threat that we need to keep an eye on and prepare for. It’s not just about losing our internet connection or getting our credit card details stolen. Terrorist hackers could target critical infrastructures like power grids or water treatment facilities and cripple our nation. So, being prepared for these eventualities is crucial. The last man-made threat discussed that could be a huge problem in artificial intelligence. Though this is still considered an existential threat, AI is already here, and it is already starting to threaten certain livelihoods through automation. But its most dangerous threat is when AI becomes smarter than even the brightest humans on this planet. When this happens, it’s not hard to see AI not wanting to be controlled by humans and over-ruling any commands given to it.
As with all of the top ten threats discussed, there is likely a blog and video I have already recorded on this channel, so we have only scratched the surface here. I encourage you to take a look at the other blogs on my channel. The goal of this 2-part blog series is not to cause fear, but to provide information on what is likely to happen. This will help you make the proper preparations and increase your chances of surviving. If you found this blog informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments, anything you would like to share, or any potential threat you would like to see more in-depth in a future blog, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.
2020 is shaping up to look like Apocalyptic Bingo. A global pandemic like we haven’t seen in 100 or more years is upon us now. Locusts in Africa are swarming and giant hornets are invading the United States. A fire season and hurricane season are soon to start. Is this the end of the world as we know it, or is this a wake-up call to get prepared for more turbulent times ahead? In January, most of us could have never conceived that we’d soon be experiencing stay-at-home orders, shortages of food, and oil prices would fall to negative numbers. One way to view this current pandemic is a contagion that weakens our immunity to other potential disasters. It makes us more susceptible to other man-made threats and leaves us more vulnerable to the devastating effects of natural disasters.
The tipping point to a catastrophic level event is really the compounding effect of more than one of these events. A cyberattack or earthquake during a pandemic where things are already on edge could create a tipping point resulting in riots, looting, civil unrest, and martial law, amongst other potential issues. So, it’s important to really have a threat assessment of the major threats potentially right over the horizon.
Prepping comes down to prepping for the possible and prepping for the probable. There are so many possibilities of things that could happen. Unless you’re off the grid with a bunker and clean water and food supplies, you cannot ever be fully confident you’re adequately prepared. If you’re prepping in an urban or suburban environment, there are many things you can do to become self-reliant when one of these 10 threats become a catastrophic reality. Even a little preparedness in advance of one of these threats positions you better to survive.
In this two-part blog series, I will review 10 of the most significant threats to our safety and survival. In part 1 of this series, we’ll look at disasters of nature, those that occur because we live on this planet, and in the second part we will examine threats that are man-made. Often, the human-made, anthropogenic, threats stem from natural disasters. As I have said, the compounding effect of more than one of these events can aggregate a larger and more deadly time.
Knowing your area will determine what is more probable for you. Those are always the immediate threats you should prepare for. The “possible” are the secondary threats you face. They are worth preparing for, but what you’ll find is that preparing for the probable prepares you also somewhat for the possible.
In this blog, the first in the series, we will look at the Earth-centric disasters we face and how to prepare for them. These are the disasters from nature that we cannot prevent. These disasters range from the common like floods, fires, and tornados, to the less common, until today, like pandemics and food shortages. On most of the threats I will discuss, there is another blog or video I have created over the years. Search this site for a more in-depth analysis of these topics and detailed instructions on how to survive them. I will try and only provide a high-level overview so I can cover all 10 of the major and most urgent threats.
Natural Disasters
The biggest and most probable threat that we will face is natural disasters. These are catastrophic events that we can’t prevent or avoid while we are living here on Earth. The best we can do is prepare for them. Fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, blizzards, volcanic eruptions, and cyclones are the types of natural disasters that can affect our way of life. It is important that we properly prepare for these disasters to ensure our survival when they occur.
It is crucial to remember that natural disasters are largely locally specific. The State of California is very prone to earthquakes and wildfires, while the State of Florida is prone to Hurricanes. Knowing which natural disasters are prone to occur in your area is critical to your preparation. This will help you prepare first for the disaster that is most likely to happen in your area. It’s a good thing that the basics of preparation are the same, regardless of the disaster. You will need to store enough food for you and your family, have water for drinking and cleaning, and a first aid kit to deal with simple illnesses or injuries. You will also need to have bug-out bags ready for you and your family in case you have to evacuate your home.
Once you’re done with the basics, it is time to get more specific with your preparations. This is where it’s important to know which natural disaster is prone to happen in your area. If you’re like me in California, which is prone to wildfire and earthquakes, there are some things you need to do. To help you prepare for wildfires, you need to ensure your home is also protected by creating a defensible space. It’s the space around your home that will act as a buffer between your house and its surrounding environment. Earthquakes are another disaster you will have to deal with if you live in California. Though it’s impossible to prevent your home from getting destroyed, you can at least prepare it so it won’t cause additional danger to you and your family. One of the things you can do is to fasten or secure heavy items like refrigerators, TV sets, and shelves.
Wherever you live, you should sign up for local text or email alerts that warn when a storm is coming. You also need to monitor local news and weather reports, so you’re informed at all times. I already did in-depth blogs on how to prepare for wildfires, earthquakes, and hurricanes. I’ll put a link to these blogs in the description section below.
Pandemics
Another threat that we are facing right now is a pandemic. I did two separate blogs last fall on the global threat we face from pandemics and how to prepare for them. The concerns I mentioned in the blog turned into reality when the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world. The pandemic has brought the world to a screeching halt, disrupting businesses, the economy, and our normal way of life. As the death toll for the Coronavirus pandemic continues to rise, more and more people are starting to realize that: one, the threat of pandemics is real, and second, a little preparation can be the difference between barely surviving and thriving.
Subsequent waves of the coronavirus are inevitable. Social distancing, the wearing of masks, and even how and when we gather will all be forever changed as a result of this current pandemic. Despite the devastating effects of Coronavirus, many experts believe that the long-term effects are still unknowable. Until the right medicines are determined for a treatment, vaccines with some effectiveness are created, and some herd immunity is developed, the pandemic will continue to hammer away at our world. To prepare for this threat, one of the first things you need to do is to ready your home. Similar to how most governments reacted to the Coronavirus pandemic, an order to stay home will be given. So, you need to better prepare to be in your home for an extended period of time, especially if it’s going to be a prolonged quarantine order. With the lessons of social distancing, hand washing, and how viruses spread, make sure you have some basic supplies on hand for the future like bottles of Isopropyl alcohol, for sterilizing things and the now ubiquitous face mask. The blog I did about pandemics provides detailed steps on how you can prepare. I’ll post a link to the blog in the description section.
Climate Change
Climate Change is an increasing threat we face now and in the immediate future. I’m not here to make a stand with regards to climate change nor am I going to argue one way or another whether climate change is caused by any sole combination of factors. Those things don’t matter, especially when we are talking about prepping for continued climate fluctuations. What’s important to consider is that the facts and science are showing that the climate is indeed changing. Yes, climate change is not new, and it will continue to change in the future. What’s alarming is the unprecedented scale at which the climate is changing. Its impact can be seen on the increase in the frequency of severe storms. 6 of the 7 wettest storms for the last 120 years occurred in the past 2 decades and they don’t see this trend changing soon.
Warmer oceans combined with the slower-moving or stalled cyclones are the reasons for the increase in storm frequency and intensity. This can cause sea levels to rise, which can have extended and devastating results. From excessive rains in traditionally dry areas to cold weather in what should be warm weather times, the agricultural industry and your food supply chain is the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The greatest survival skill in a prepper’s arsenal is gardening and foraging knowledge. Reducing your dependence on unreliable food sources minimizes the threat of climate change on your food supply. Which brings us to our fourth immediate threat: food shortages.
Famines & Food Shortages
The Coronavirus pandemic has greatly exposed the fragility of our food supplies. The issue is not that our farms are running out of supplies, they are running out of labor because of COVID-19. Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, two of the biggest meat producers in America, and other similar companies stopped operations on plants where workers tested positive for the virus. Dairy producers have been forced to dump thousands of gallons of milk since they couldn’t sell in their established markets. With schools closed, namely elementary schools, demand for cheese and milk has decreased. The economic weakness of big export markets like China also resulted in a decrease in milk exports, further intensifying the dairy producers’ problem with the surplus of goods. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Aside from slashing imports, countries are also closing their borders because of the Coronavirus pandemic, further disrupting the global food supply.
To prepare for the looming food shortage, you should have a 2 to 3-month emergency food supply, some would say 6 to 12 months is the minimum. You never know how severe or how long this catastrophe will be. So, preparing for the worst can ensure you and your family’s survival. You should stock up on foods that are easy to cook and have a long shelf life. I’ve covered in detail the food shortage problem in one of my blogs. I also have quite a few blogs on what foods to make sure you have in your prepper inventory. I encourage you to check these out to understand the signs you need to look out for when it comes to food shortages. I also did a blog on how to easily build up a 2-week or longer supply of usable food. I’ll post a link in the description section so you can check out both blogs.
Civil Unrest, Martial Law, Civil War, Revolution
The Coronavirus pandemic may just be the beginning of an even bigger threat. The situation has sent a number of red flags up. And though there hasn’t yet been any large-scale looting or martial law, the government has already ordered its citizens to self-quarantine and stay home. When a population becomes too restless or feels they are not treated fairly, civil unrest can occur. Already, small pockets of people under the auspices of “freedom” are ignoring and protesting against the self-quarantining measures. Remember, a society thrives when it acts in unity against an enemy, and divided peoples are easily conquered.
Currently, the number of protesters is just a small percentage of the population. But it’s not hard to see many more Americans becoming restless if there’s no clear ending in sight for the quarantine period. Should this happen, civil unrest will likely take place to larger degrees. The natural government response is to declare martial law to restore order. Not everyone, though, will agree with this declaration, which can further cause a divide in our country. As states take sides, it’s not completely impossible to imagine that a civil war or a revolution could take place. People will lose faith in the government and start taking matters into their own hands. You can learn more about the possibility of martial law and civil war happening in our country and what you can do to prepare from the blogs on this channel. I’ll post a link in the description below.
The devastating effects of the Coronavirus pandemic continue to plague the world, but this is only the beginning. There are still many threats that can affect us in the immediate future. The biggest and most probable threats we will face immediately are natural disasters, continued pandemics, climate change, famines and food shortages, and civil unrest, martial law, and even the possibility of civil war.
Three months’ worth of food or sources of stored clean water, can prepare you to survive both probable and possible threats that become catastrophic, global changing events. Think of the probable and the possible in terms of time, as well. Hurricanes are probable if you live in certain regions like the southeast United States. They will occur yearly. And, yes, while the Earth getting struck by a comet or a volcano suddenly erupting, like the now dormant Yellowstone Caldera, might be things you want to consider as probable, they may not happen in your, your children, or their children’s lifetimes. You could spin for hours on the possible, so always make sure you’re focusing on the probable, and adjusting your inventory and plans appropriately.
In part 2 of this blog series, we’ll discuss 5 more immediate threats, the man-made kind, that we need to prepare for. If you found this blog informative and helpful, please feel free to like and share it with your friends, family, and community. If you have any comments or anything you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below. I do read many of the comments and respond to them when I am able to–usually within the first hour of releasing the blog.
As always, please stay safe out there.
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Perhaps one of the oldest skills, hunting and fishing puts meat on the table. Most people today are heavily reliant upon the meat and fishing industries to put protein on their plates. Industrial meat and fishing production have introduced a wide range of toxins to our tables as well. From Escherichia coli, commonly known as E. coli, to high levels of Mercury in our seafood, our over-dependence on industrial sources of meat is a fragile source when health is also at stake. Also, the types of meats we put on our plate lacks variation. There are hundreds of chicken breeds in existence, for instance, yet industrial farming only produces a few. According to FishBase, a global species database, there are over 33,000 different types of fish, yet the average American could probably list the types of fish they have eaten on one hand- two hands at the most.
The second skill to get you by is foraging. Just as our tables lack diversity when it comes to meats, they also lack diversity when it comes to the edible plants we consume. Foraging for food is an essential skill to cultivate now– that pun is intended. Did you know you can eat the entire sunflower plant, not just the seed? Did you know you can eat daisies and many other flowers? Do you know what mushrooms, berries, and nuts you can eat? If you grew up in the Midwest or South, maybe you harvested gooseberries for grandma’s gooseberry pie. Knowing what parts of what plants are edible and in your area is critical to having food on your table when the normal supply chains we are overly-dependent upon disappear and our own stores of food dwindle low.
Gardening and farming are the third skill types that will help you to survive through an extended depression. Remember, the Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted nearly a decade. Another depression may last just as long or longer. In another blog, we will be discussing apartment gardening, but if you are fortunate enough to have an area to garden, farm, or even raise chickens, goats or some other animal that produces food beyond their own meat, knowing these skills will allow you to thrive amidst the suffering. These skills put food directly on your table and, when done right, provide you with saleable or exchangeable products to carry your family through an extended economic downturn.
Surviving a depression relies heavily upon your ability to not waste anything. Most of the meats used in modern barbecue were deemed inedible and given to poor folks or slaves. The long slow cooking and spicing of the tough meats created something delicious. Barbecue and smoking was used to preserve meat. After all, it would be difficult and foolish to attempt to eat a whole cow or pig in one sitting. So, cooking and not wasting foods are a critical part of surviving. During the Dust Bowl, where drought, rabbits, or grasshoppers wiped out almost all the vegetation, brined tumbleweed became food for consumption. Russian thistle, or tumbleweed, grew rampantly during this period—one of the few plants that could survive the harsh conditions. People became so desperate that they started to brine the tumbleweed, rendering it edible.
Ask a cook if he bakes or a baker if she cooks. The fact is that baking is a skill all in itself that can’t just be lumped in with cooking. Baking is a science that requires some exact measurements and precise temperatures and time. It’s not a skill you can just instantly pick-up, which is why you need to practice it before you really need to. Having just one bread loaf recipe or one cookie recipe won’t be enough to get you through a significant economic downturn. What will you do when flour isn’t available? Or butter? Or milk? You should know how to make flour from other sources, like acorns, chickpeas, or rice. Explore old recipes. Know how to make hardtack and not just a loaf of white bread. Try out other recipes now, before you absolutely need to.
Sewing, knitting, crocheting, braiding, knot tying, and any manipulation of textiles or threads and ropes are valuable skills to know in a prolonged economic depression. Whether you are knitting a blanket or hats to keep your children warm, repairing a last pair of jeans to last another year, or harvesting an old sweater to make threads for a fishing net, the manipulation of fabrics and threads are a skill you can’t live without. Most people only know how to tie a square knot, but that won’t hold a heavy load or secure a fishing hook. Just as a single strand of rope isn’t as strong as multiple strands wound together, the more you know of these sciences the more likely you are to be able to produce what you need to survive and to have a skill in high demand in a post-collapse society.
We put home brewing and fermentation together because the science of how they work is similar. Technically, we could have put it along with baking, since bread-making often involves yeast consuming sugars. That’s really all there is to fermentation and homebrewing, either yeast or bacteria consume available sugars and produces either alcohol or lactic acid. Both of those by-products are useful in their own ways. That, obviously, oversimplifies the process. There’s much to learn with these skills, and whether you’re making beer, mead, Dandelion wine, or pickled tumbleweed, they are skills you need to learn now. Making an error in the processes can create more waste than usable products. The fact of it all is that people will always want alcohol to consume, so having the skill of homebrewing provides you with a basic skill you can barter, sell, or exchange within a prolonged economic downturn. It’s important to point out here that learning to can foods also exposes you to the skill of fermentation. Many of these skills overlap with each other. If you harvest cucumbers from your garden, you can extend their usage by knowing how to ferment them into pickles.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, the old adage says, but what do you do when the one machine you rely upon the most breaks and you have nothing to replace it? What do you do when you suddenly need something manufactured but don’t know how to? Mechanical and engineering skills are critical. Many of us may remember the amazing ingenuity exhibited by our grandfathers to fix, repair, or innovate a brand new item to fulfill a need or make life easier. Our industrious ancestors used a single steam or diesel engine to do everything from washing clothes to pumping water to threshing crops.
The medical sciences are another skill that can get you through another great depression. You don’t have to be a doctor, but you can easily become a certified EMT or certified in CPR. Every skill you learn in the medical sciences will not only increase your chances of survival in a variety of situations, but they will allow you to care for others. We have all seen the movies where the prisoner becomes the only person that can provide the right medical attention to save the captor chief’s children or spouse. The reason we have all seen that plot is because medicine is nearly archetypal. Caring for others and rescuing people from certain death is in our DNA.
The final skill we chose to cover is about kinder care: teaching, childcare, natal and postnatal care. Children aren’t born with user manuals. Ask any parent what they had to learn at the moment when raising their child. Knowing how to give birth to a child, becoming a lactation expert, caring for small infants and children, even teaching, require very specific skills. Fortunately, if you’ve ever had a child, you already know some of the skills.
The most expensive but most valuable asset during an economic depression is land. And it should not be just any land. It should be a property that can provide you with clean water and have the capacity to let you produce food. Food and water are going to be two of the most crucial resources that you will need during an economic collapse. Having land where you can plant and grow different crops and have access to clean water will ensure that food and water will be less of a problem during a depression. The land is also yours in name and it will be harder for other people to take it away from you, except through eminent domain or by force.
A more affordable thing to acquire before an economic depression is knowledge. Whether you read a book or take a course, knowledge gained before a crisis occurs is a worthy investment. A dollar spent on learning now will pay you countless revenue in the future. Obtaining land for farming and gardening is one thing but knowing how to properly start a vegetable garden or farm is another. In fact, no tools in your survival kit are more important than your knowledge and skills. All of the tools that you have will only be as good as your knowledge in using them. This includes your land since its usefulness and overall potential will greatly depend on the skills and knowledge that you possess. This is why knowledge is the second thing that you need to acquire before the collapse. Knowledge about farming, gardening, and animal husbandry are things that will help you properly utilize your land. You should also learn how to hunt and forage in your area, which are key things to know for your survival. The more you know how to do things, the better your chances of surviving become. You should also be a student of history. An economic depression is not new, our country already experienced this in 1929. Read about how people survived and thrived during those times. Learn the skills that they had and use that information in your own preparation.
When banks fail, the paper currency we use for buying things becomes worthless and our society will start to use other forms of currency to purchase goods and services. Having funds outside your single bank account will increase your likelihood of having money resources to use during times of disaster. And one form of currency that will likely retain its value, even during an economic collapse, is precious metals. They are known as a good hedge against inflation and the collapse of currencies. One fortunate benefit of our highly connected world is that large sums of money can be transferred from a failed economy to a stronger economy. In a global economic depression, some countries will still fare better than others. Precious metals provide you a transferable commodity to shift your funds from failing systems to recovering systems. 
Bulk staple foods are the second most important thing to have in your prepper supplies with water being the first. Use this time to wisely restock your preps. The first part of 2020 we saw a lot of store shelves run empty and we saw some disruptions to our regular food supplies. We have a great opportunity here to restock and increase our supplies of dried food, peanut butter, hygiene products, medicines, vitamins, and so forth. The first part of this year was, hopefully, the worst of what we will experience, but what if it was just a glimmer of the future?
Personal security items, such as guns, ammo, and other forms of personal protection that you prefer are things that you will also need to buy before the country experiences a depression. It is going to be almost impossible to purchase these things during a disaster. If you already own a gun, you saw how quickly ammo supplies disappeared in the first part of the year. Take advantage of this opportunity to restock your supplies. In a crisis you would have to find a store that is still open for business to buy these things, and you will likely have to deal with a shortage of supplies and very long lines. It is also better to deal with the background checks, even for ammo purchases in some states, prior to a disaster where things are still normal. Aside from purchasing a gun, you should also know how to properly use and care for them. Just like with a land, a gun is only as useful as your skills and knowledge on how to use it. Your knowledge of how to use guns and other self-defense items can be the difference between life and death during a grid-down scenario.
Medicines are another important item that you will need to purchase prior to an economic depression. This is especially true if you have a critical need for ongoing medication. Pharmaceutical companies can become unreliable during a crisis. You cannot be sure they will be able to supply pharmacies with the stocks of medicine that you will need. So stocking up on the medicine you will need is crucial. For this, you might have to ask your doctor to provide you a prescription that can allow you to buy in bulk. You should also check if laws in your city or state allow bulk purchases of prescription medicine and how many you can buy. You can also try purchasing from out of country suppliers just to get all of the medicine you will need. If buying bulk non-OTC medicines becomes an issue, you can also consider looking at less effective, but functional medicinal herbs. Many drugs derive from the concentration of the medicinal properties of plants. Should supplies of certain medications disappear, your only possibility might be medicinal plants.
It’s also a good idea to stock up denim, canvas, and other durable fabrics. These items will be useful, especially if the economic depression drags on for years. Clothing manufacturers and retail stores are going to be businesses that won’t fare well during this period. Many stores and companies will likely go out of business, which means getting new clothes and apparel or even repairing them will be hard to do during this time. You can create clothes, bags, and other useful items with the denim and fabric that you have. Or you can use them to repair clothes or apparel that you have. The beauty of creating clothes and apparel or repairing them is that you can use that skill to barter for other items or supplies with other people. With clothing manufacturers closed, many people will be looking for other ways to get new clothes or have the ones they have repaired. As a child, it was common to have for my mother to put patches on the knees of my pants when I ripped them. She learned sewing from her mother which lived through tough times. My grandfather before his passing not that long ago would still repair clothing and rarely threw anything anyway. We live in a disposable world, but previous generations understood the importance of repairing and extending the life of their clothing.
It’s no surprise that food is going to be one of the most sought after resources during an economic depression. The coronavirus pandemic has already exposed how fragile our food system is and that same system may suffer worse if a depression were to happen. This is why it’s also critical that you have hunting and fishing supplies in your home or bug out place. You need to be prepared for the possibility of our normal food supply chain being disrupted or disappearing altogether, and knowing how to fish or hunt can be the difference between you and your family starving or surviving. Even if you have a garden, a farm, and enough stocks of staple food, there’s no harm in having another way to acquire food to eat. You need to be prepared for everything that can probably happen, and having the supplies to hunt and fish ensures you and your family won’t starve to death in case something goes wrong with your other source of food.
A cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven should be part of any preppers supplies. You might already have some pots and pans that you use for cooking and you think that is enough to help you cook and survive during trying times. That might be true to some extent, but many of the modern pots and pans that we see today are not really durable, break easy, and will not fair well after repeated cooking over an open flame. This means that you could find yourself without a good means to cook during a crisis. To prepare for that, you will need to have a cast-iron skillet or a Dutch oven. Cast iron skillets with lid and Dutch ovens are very strong and sturdy. From the stove top to the oven to open fires, you don’t have to worry about them breaking. One of the cast iron skillets I use at home is easily 100 years old. This type of cookware can last for many generations if properly maintained.
The final item in our list of things to buy before an economic depression is essential survival items. These items will have greater use for you, especially during a prolonged economic depression. One survival item that you will need will be a good water filter. We personally have a Berkey water filter with backup filters. Another survival item you will need is a durable pair of hiking boots. It’s important that you make sure they are really durable since it could be the last pair of shoes you might have to wear in a while. For processing wood that you can use for construction and in building a fire, you will need an axe. You will also need a way to start a fire, a portable shelter, some camping gear, multi-tools, pocket swiss knife, light sources, and more.
One of the most obvious indications that there’s a recession or financial collapse on the horizon is the stock market. When the Great Depression began in 1930, one of the primary reasons for it was the stock market crash of 1929, which saw the 
The country’s Gross Domestic Product measure has contracted by 5% during the first quarter of 2020. This contraction marks the first time 
Another sign of a possible financial meltdown is the continued problem of income inequality in the U.S. The recent death of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed have once again put the spotlight on the perceptions of a racial divide and an inequality that is plaguing the country. This has been a problem for many decades already, but the income inequality gap has been increasing since 1970. This is further compounded along racial lines. The 
Probably the greatest indicator of a looming economic downturn is consumer confidence. As mentioned earlier that Consumer Spending accounts for 70% of the U.S. GDP. This means that as long as people are spending money and buying things, our country’s GDP will likely perform well. But people haven’t been buying things lately due to the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic and the government’s response to shutting down the economy. The Consumer Confidence Index chart of the last 7 years shows a nearly vertical drop in 2020. The 
Civil unrest has erupted across the country following multiple videos of police brutality. Some of these crowds have led to violence and looting. This situation comes as the country is trying to jumpstart the economy following the devastating effects of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many businesses in different states are just starting to open up their stores after months of being closed down due to quarantine orders. But the opening was cut short as many businesses across different states are once again being forced to close down their stores, this time because of the looting and destruction, according to an 
America isn’t a stranger to unrest. Over its 244 year history, it has seen civil unrest, world wars, civil wars, systemic racism against many races, and its full share of natural disasters. The challenges of the nation’s history are really too many to name. Each trial and tribulation has tested the country’s resilience, and each time America has emerged stronger– bruised, bumped, and battered– but still intact, still one nation.
This lightning fire of our connectivity is fueled with the cynicism and outrage of many. Where we might have had somewhat benign discussions about political differences of opinion at a family barbeque before, the anonymity of the internet emboldens people to express any ugly thought they may have. To see this in real-time, simply view any comments thread for any news article on the internet. Though I’m not espousing any particular political idealogy or proposing any solution other than to prepare yourself, even the comments thread of this blog will likely demonstrate the deep divisions this country faces.
If the pandemic worsens, civil unrest increases, or large scale voter fraud is implied or proven, the election could be postponed or canceled at a state or federal level. This would immediately, because of the Twentieth Amendment, cause a Constitutional crisis. As Congress, the President, and the judicial branches struggled to find a solution to that Constitutional crisis, they would be forced to work together while a nation and a world remained uncertain as to who was actually in charge anymore. So, again, protests, riots, looting, and military intervention could supplant democracy and bring our democratic society to a point of collapse.
In this blog entry, we will examine the multiple circumstances that will lead to a formal declaration of martial law and what you can do now to protect yourself. Even before the more formal declaration, however, it is important to understand that martial law can come in many forms and can be established without even a formal declaration. Armed police, National Guard, the military, even bands of controlling militias or armed citizens can bring about the same effect as martial law and can threaten your freedom and even your life. As a prepper, my primary concern is to look at the horizon and help you determine how and what you need to be prepared for. While some may want to see some political slant in this blog, know that there is not. As an observer of the current conflicts, I merely strive to extrapolate out the possible immediate effects which can threaten your safety and hope to provide you with a few measures to help keep you and your family safe.
These are, without a doubt, difficult times. Historically, we have, as a country, faced divisions and conflicts like this before. The Tulsa Race Massacre of the 1920s, the Chicago Riots in 1968, even the Minneapolis truck strike of 1934, conflicts will always exist in some form. They can become violent, and they can lead to declarations of martial law. Regardless of the formal declaration, forms of martial law through increased armed enforcement and proactive policing can lead to greater conflict.
With terrorism likely to continue being a threat to us, just knowing it is going to be a continuous problem is not enough. We will need to have a plan to ensure our survival. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness conducted a series of studies and showed that 72% of Americans are anticipating future terror attacks. However, less than 50% have an emergency plan for themself and their families. After terrorist attacks like 9/11 and the Boston bombings, people are left wondering what they can do to keep their families safe. One of the main things you can do is to work together with your community. An article from the Metropolitan Police in the UK said that communities defeat terrorism. This means being vigilant in your neighborhood and reporting any suspicious activities or things out of the ordinary that you hear or see can help to keep you safe. People in stationary vehicles keeping an eye on a building or structure, people using recording equipment, including camera phones, and seen making notes or sketches of security details, or someone who is suspiciously paying close attention to specific entry and exit points, stairwells, hallways, or fire escapes could all be planning for future terrorist attacks. You should also know what your community’s emergency plans are in case a terrorist attack happens.
Though a dirty bomb can be disruptive, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing you can do to prepare for it. According to an article from Slate, one of the crucial things you need to do is to make sure you don’t panic. The chances of being exposed to a harmful dose of a radioactive substance are very slim, even in the worst-case scenario, if you remain calm. Panicking during this period will only make the situation worse. If you find yourself within the vicinity or in the immediate path of dust clouds from the explosion, stay indoors and close all windows and turn off air conditioners and cover ventilation systems. If you happen to get exposed, take a shower, and safely dispose of your clothes and shoes. It’s also crucial to have a battery-powered radio that you can use to listen for updates. You also need to know where the shelters are in your area. You never know when you need to evacuate your home and go to a shelter, so knowing ahead of time where it is will likely be critical. Again, you should prepare in advance a “bug out” bag for you and your family. And, as mentioned earlier, know all the possible escape routes you can go to in case there is a blockage or if one route is unpassable. A physical, paper map of your area and a compass will also be helpful in case you get lost.
Another threat that we are likely going to face in the immediate future is cyber-warfare. This doesn’t seem like much of an immediate problem since not having access to the internet might not seem too bad or getting individual credit cards hacked is more of an individual problem and a nuisance. But cyber-warfare is not just about losing internet connection or getting credit card information stolen. One form of dangerous cyber-warfare is using malicious software to destroy critical infrastructure or even nuclear processes. Hackers infiltrate a system and remain undiscovered by launching their malicious code in critical computer systems. Stuxnet was one such attack on nuclear fuel refining centrifuge systems. The code was designed to sabotage the centrifuge refining of uranium while showing normal operating conditions to the facility monitors. It has since been proven that Chernobyl, an explosion at a nuclear power plant over 30 years ago that has left large swathes of land uninhabitable to this day, was a result of one simple miscalculation and process in the plant’s operation. Another form of cyber-warfare is the Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. In this type of attack, hackers overload and overwhelm a server so it won’t be able to respond to legitimate requests. A DDoS attack on our grid, could create blackouts across the country, and easily launch the country into chaos. I did an in-depth blog and video on how cyber-attacks can bring our nation to its knees. I also provided some tips on what you can do to prepare should those events happen. I’ll post a link to the blog in the description section and I encourage you to watch it to learn more about the dangers of cyber-warfare and how you can protect yourself from it.
But AI presents a far greater threat than just our livelihoods or the danger of over-reliance. One of the biggest threats that world-renowned billionaire and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk fears is Artificial Intelligence. “The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads,” Musk said. He fears digital super-intelligence, which is when an AI that possesses intelligence that far surpasses that of the brightest and most gifted human minds thinks without the controls and constraints of humans. Many experts in the field dismiss Musk’s fears, but he argues that it’s fundamentally flawed to think that there won’t be an AI that is going to be smarter than any person on the planet. The issue with this is can that smartest machine be controlled? As the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said, “one can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” This might all sound far-fetched, but as AI continues to improve and develop at a rapid rate, it’s not hard to imagine digital superintelligence happening soon. Some of the leading minds already view it as a threat, and that should be good enough for us to consider it as well. Many things that appear in movies become the horrors of the future. Is it unreasonable to think a Terminator movie’s Skynet may be in our future?
The tipping point to a catastrophic level event is really the compounding effect of more than one of these events. A cyberattack or earthquake during a pandemic where things are already on edge could create a tipping point resulting in riots, looting, civil unrest, and martial law, amongst other potential issues. So, it’s important to really have a threat assessment of the major threats potentially right over the horizon.
It is crucial to remember that natural disasters are largely locally specific. The State of California is very prone to earthquakes and wildfires, while the State of Florida is prone to Hurricanes. Knowing which natural disasters are prone to occur in your area is critical to your preparation. This will help you prepare first for the disaster that is most likely to happen in your area. It’s a good thing that the basics of preparation are the same, regardless of the disaster. You will need to store enough food for you and your family, have water for drinking and cleaning, and a first aid kit to deal with simple illnesses or injuries. You will also need to have bug-out bags ready for you and your family in case you have to evacuate your home.
Subsequent waves of the coronavirus are inevitable. Social distancing, the wearing of masks, and even how and when we gather will all be forever changed as a result of this current pandemic. Despite the devastating effects of Coronavirus, many experts believe that the long-term effects are still unknowable. Until the right medicines are determined for a treatment, vaccines with some effectiveness are created, and some herd immunity is developed, the pandemic will continue to hammer away at our world. To prepare for this threat, one of the first things you need to do is to ready your home. Similar to how most governments reacted to the Coronavirus pandemic, an order to stay home will be given. So, you need to better prepare to be in your home for an extended period of time, especially if it’s going to be a prolonged quarantine order. With the lessons of social distancing, hand washing, and how viruses spread, make sure you have some basic supplies on hand for the future like bottles of Isopropyl alcohol, for sterilizing things and the now ubiquitous face mask. The blog I did about pandemics provides detailed steps on how you can prepare. I’ll post a link to the blog in the description section.
The Coronavirus pandemic has greatly exposed the fragility of our food supplies. The issue is not that our farms are running out of supplies, they are running out of labor because of COVID-19. Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, two of the biggest meat producers in America, and other similar companies stopped operations on plants where workers tested positive for the virus. Dairy producers have been forced to dump thousands of gallons of milk since they couldn’t sell in their established markets. With schools closed, namely elementary schools, demand for cheese and milk has decreased. The economic weakness of big export markets like China also resulted in a decrease in milk exports, further intensifying the dairy producers’ problem with the surplus of goods. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Aside from slashing imports, countries are also closing their borders because of the Coronavirus pandemic, further disrupting the global food supply.
Currently, the number of protesters is just a small percentage of the population. But it’s not hard to see many more Americans becoming restless if there’s no clear ending in sight for the quarantine period. Should this happen, civil unrest will likely take place to larger degrees. The natural government response is to declare martial law to restore order. Not everyone, though, will agree with this declaration, which can further cause a divide in our country. As states take sides, it’s not completely impossible to imagine that a civil war or a revolution could take place. People will lose faith in the government and start taking matters into their own hands. You can learn more about the possibility of martial law and civil war happening in our country and what you can do to prepare from the blogs on this channel. I’ll post a link in the description below.
Three months’ worth of food or sources of stored clean water, can prepare you to survive both probable and possible threats that become catastrophic, global changing events. Think of the probable and the possible in terms of time, as well. Hurricanes are probable if you live in certain regions like the southeast United States. They will occur yearly. And, yes, while the Earth getting struck by a comet or a volcano suddenly erupting, like the now dormant Yellowstone Caldera, might be things you want to consider as probable, they may not happen in your, your children, or their children’s lifetimes. You could spin for hours on the possible, so always make sure you’re focusing on the probable, and adjusting your inventory and plans appropriately.