The world may be ending, but that's no reason to fret! Be prepared, instead! (That's so catchy we ought to trademark it). Meet the Doomsday "Preppers," survivalists who prepare for the coming Apocalypse and, in some cases, profit at the same time:
ABC's Nightline has more: Link (Warning: auto-start video) | National Geographic series about it: Doomsday Prepper"There's a lot of different things that could happen," Ralston said. "For me, I look at prepping as kind of like insurance. You have car insurance, health insurance, life insurance."
Call it Apocalypse insurance. Ralston turned his family's two-car garage into a staging area. Inside is a trailer, which he keeps packed and ready to go at all times, stockpiles of freeze-dried food, including cartons of canned chicken with a shelf life of 15 years, survival gear, such as a system for purifying polluted water, first aid kits and lots of weapons and ammunition. His son has his own AK-47.
"In the beginning, my wife really wasn't on the same page as I was," Ralston said. "But in reality, the more information I started to give to her, it opened up her eyes to the other potential threats that are out there."
Although I'm prepared to shelter in place for two weeks and defend my home against a minor breakdown in civil order, that's about all that I can afford to do without financially compromising myself. Mostly, I try to take a moderate stance, which was nicely expressed by Les Jones when he encountered a survivalist blog post on guinea pig recipes:
I try not to judge. Different people fall at different points on the preparedness spectrum. Some people surely think I’m paranoid because I own guns and my 401K has silver and gold instead of stocks. Others surely think I’m an innocent little lamb because I don’t have a collection of AR-15s and a bomb shelter filled with MREs and gas masks. But brother, if you ever find yourself collecting chili recipes for guinea pig you should take a long, hard look at your life and ponder how you ever came to give up on the world.
He asked me if I have any survival plans and I said "Yeah.... I know where you live"