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Post by patience on Oct 23, 2011 21:56:40 GMT -6
Childhood on a small farm, with hard times, gave me the basics, then the book Robinson Crusoe made a big impression on me. But the thing that really got my mental wheels churning was the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973-4. That caused serious unemployment (25%) in the town where I worked, and got my attention.
Today, every event I read in the news causes me to think about it. Economic woes, climate and energy are really getting my attention now. What problems are top priority on your prep list?
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Post by Jerry D Young on Oct 24, 2011 14:57:46 GMT -6
Cuban Missile Crisis as a first experience at 9, "Alas Babylon" at 14, and been on the path ever since.
My preps are primarily for natural disasters, but the bench mark is being prepared for a nuclear war. If I'm ready for it, I'm ready for most other things, with just a few additions.
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Post by patience on Oct 24, 2011 17:37:09 GMT -6
The Cuban Missle Crisis scared the snot out of our little country bumpkin town of Palmyra, Indiana, where the city limit sign said pop. 312. They never changed that sign in ten years. The old joke was that the population never changed, because every time a baby was born, some man left town....
But everyone was so ignorant of what nuclear war meant that they sort of ignored it. They simply had no idea of the consequences we so narrowly averted. Everyone thought that nuclear war couldn't possibly be any worse than WWII, except that the bombs were bigger. Actually, the Sputnik satellite had been more terrifying back in October of 1957, since we could not fathom what it meant and imagined the worst.
The govt. had successfully kept us ignorant of what it all meant. Of course, this was the same bunch that had once showed spraying kids with DDT as a testament to the safety of DDT! Nobody knew what to think about this. We had all seen the govt. movies about hiding under our desks in school, but had no idea why. So, crude jokes were made about "fallout" and life went on as before.
I got my first driver's license that October of 1962, so that was a much bigger deal to me. It took me another 20 years before I found an old copy of Alas Babylon, and figured out how close we had come to a worldwide disaster in 1962. By then, other things had gotten my attention as cause for alarm.
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Post by hua man on Oct 25, 2011 10:48:00 GMT -6
Mad Max. Cliche, but it started me searching for the genre in literature and eventually old Civil Defense publications. Wilderness survival of edible plants and lean-to shelters. "Life After Doomsday" by Dr. Bruce Clayton really opened my eyes a bit. Then the Internet came, and terabytes of info at my disposale. Read and learned about Y2K. Read "Atlas Shrugged" at the age of 32. Wasn't until '09 until I found Frugal's. Read from TOM and Jerry, Fleataxi, Kathy in FL, and the others did my edumacation take off. I would read their stories and verify their facts. (The Stories could've been embellished. I wanted to be sure. Grain of salt thing.)
I may be a basement apartment dwelling troll, but I'm one with options.
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