Most of us don’t realize this but all of us are already in a ‘Survival Group’. It’s called the ‘Human Race’. And it has been trying to survive continuously since the dawn of time.
The trick is to differentiate between a survival ‘Rat Race’, and its dangerous mythology that leads us all astray, and a personal social integration with others that can be more beneficial in emergency bad times than going it alone.
As children we were told that the tortoise ‘always’ beats the hare in the end. So just go slowly and surely in life and you’ll be okay. Which of course becomes laughable after you ’grow up’ and discover that ‘speed’ initiative is critical in many successful applications in life. Especially if you want to do maximal gains in the shortest time.
Why, then, do ‘they’ tell us these lies? Because it is how ‘they’ get so rich and powerful while the rest of us snooze and lose. They know that time is more often an enemy than an ally. ‘They’ minimize the competition and seize the opportunity to hedge their bets by telling you to slow down while they, themselves, picked up the pace to really get ahead in the competition. This is aka sheeple mind control.
But anybody who has been into prepping for a while realizes that the best survival tool is your brain. So once you learn the reality of things in life you become better ‘prepared’ to survive. Good preppers cannot lock themselves into a mind prison of abject intransigence and obstinacy.
You’ve all heard the expression that ‘the mind is like a parachute…it does not function well until opened!’ Your friends at Survivopedia noticed that too many of us are in a quandary about bugging out or bugging in. And although most preppers ultimately come to the realization that it’s better to bug out to a pre-determined BOL in bad catastrophic circumstances if you want to minimize your risk of life, their personal situation makes this option unavailable for various reasons.
But after you get over the ‘mythology’ of ‘surviving in place’, the fact is that the difference between bugging in and bugging out is like night and day, no matter which you think is best. And the decision must be made with both the long term emergency dilemma, and the short term concern compared in the final analysis.
But both situations share a potential need for having a group support factor with this being even more critical with bugging in if it becomes a bad, long term situation. Therefore forming or joining an SPG (Survival Prepping Group) should be something to seriously consider for improving your odds of any kind of survival, especially in a major event.
It might be as simple as getting your family and/or close friends interested enough to cooperate and plan for a quick evacuation to a far enough away motel for a local emergency such as a hurricane or a nuclear power plant meltdown if you are on the Easter seaboard coastal areas or an earthquake in California. If you’re alone without extensive training or resources, you might have to try to seek out like-minded prepper persons and go from there? In any event here are important things to consider:
1. Stregth in Numbers
There’s a reason for the timeless aphorism ’misery loves company’. It’s one of the foundational concepts for the proliferation of the species. Our primitive ancestors would never have made it past the first predator beast’s lunch hour if their social structures didn‘t evolve ahead of the basic biological family unit and into an extended tribal or clan paradigm, which would then create a ’community’ where the ‘misery’ was mitigated.
Organizing in mutual harmony is intrinsic to our humanity and social structuring. Belonging to a group of friends or relatives that share the same goals and are committed to helping one another achieve them is far better than trying it all by your lonesome. Especially if you are physically ‘challenged’ in some way as many of our senior patriot preppers are.
However, there’s a dark side to the equation. So-called outside the norm group in a variety of cultures are nothing new. Before modern disaster/end times survival became popular there were some who chose to drop out from the conventional status quo and form their own community mini-cultures which became known as cult groups or ‘retreatists‘.
They found remote property and minimized as much contact with the outside world as possible. Most of these contemporary groups failed due to the psychological problems with misrepresented ideals of the group as a whole which more often than not opposed or contradicted the individual group members’ sensibilities, morals, and emotional content.
It was also very difficult to make the transition from the conveniences of modern society and experience the ‘withdrawal symptoms’ of more ‘primitive’ and solitary life styles. These situations eventually devolved into mini-dictatorships and invariably broke apart.
Therefore any group formation specifically related to emergency prepping and survival must be entered into ‘carefully’ in order to preserve the potential benefits and not create a expanded problem in the longer run. It must not be allowed to become one of those whack-job anti-g para military groups that the treasonous anti-2/A pundits enjoy vilifying as such to make sure the ’authorities’ take ’interest’ in their activities for future ’reference’ as potential ’domestic’ type terrorists.
In a serious long term survival situation, however, even a small core group as tight as two or three persons with good mutual reliability, compatibility, utility, and more importantly, a viable, rehearsed PLAN to help each other, has a tremendous advantage over going it completely alone.
2. Surviving a Major National Catastrophic Event.
First let’s face the largest differential rationale between bugging out and bugging in.
The decision mainly being determined by how bad it is, or going to be. Although a level 5 super hurricane or an earthquake measuring 8 or 9 on the Richter scale can devastate an entire coastal city almost as bad as a bomb, if you planned in advance to set shelter in place that protected you from the initial force of the storm or quake and you survived it, there would soon be immediate first responders and government help and supplies and good outside support for immediate aid and rebuilding again. So bugging in might have worked in these types of disaster.
However, if something like a large meteor strike, a long overdue pandemic plague, or major EMP or terrorist power grid attack shut down most of the nation’s power grid, collapsing the commodity and resource supply, grinding everything down to a massive swath of death and destruction and effected almost everybody with everything from anarchy to widespread starvation and looting then being in a major city would not be the best place anymore for any ’bugs’ let alone humans.
People will always naturally come together for support and help until there is not enough left for everybody, and no help ever coming again, then it will be every man for himself. And it will be nothing like you could have imagined in your most frightening nightmares.
Did you know that not only was there cannibalism in many parts of the world when starvation set in even in relatively modern times, but in the Roman empire in its last days in the city of Rome after it collapsed, some of the good, but starving, ‘citizens’ killed and ate their slaves and others?
If you are not bugging out from a major city in a true long terms break down of society, you will not likely make it on your own for very long, no matter how much you have stocked, locked, and loaded… But having a prepared survival group that you can count on would be a much better situation for you when it finally occurred to you that you had made a grave mistake by not bugging out earlier.
3. Facilitating the Bug Out
If you are inclined to be one of those who would prefer to get the hell out of Dodge City to a relatively safe spot in a more rural location at the first sniff of any really dangerous ‘dark clouds forming on the horizon’ because you always can come back if the storm blows over, but you have no reliable family or friends and you are all by your lonesome in the big concrete jungle, living almost a monastic lifestyle from day to day and hand to mouth on a very limited budget and you really don’t even have any friends except for the nosey pigeon hanging around your window sill and the mangy alley cat trying to catch it on occasion, and you don‘t even own a car…then you might be a more prudent survivor if you considered joining or even forming your own prepper group- also of like mindedness- to mutually assist each other in a small group bug out? Remember, if you’re in this situation, you can bet there are others within walking distance of you, likely thinking about this also?
Forming or Joining a Team
Truth be told, if you think you need and want to be in a serious survival group plan, it isn’t something you find in the discount aisle at Walmart. But it’s not that hard to locate or set up if you are willing to do the diligence. You can start with the following:
- Do a computer search of ‘prepping/survivalist groups/clubs’ in your city or area. If you google ’prepper communities’ by state you’ll find several which, unfortunately, are closer to the ’groups’ I’ve described above. Many of these are a little more trustworthy as they are of Christian based foundation. And in my state there are even dedicated church groups who have rural ’retreats’ on multiple acre tracts owned by the denomination Co-op that are well stocked and set up for long term ‘end times’ emergency survival for their members. So if you are a loner but attend church you can check with your minister if he knows of any like minded individuals you can associate with?
- If you live in a city with no plans for much of anything yet, you can fish around by post a card at your local sporting goods/gun store where sooner or later serious preppers will come through saying something like ’disaster preparedness interested person(s) seeks like minded individuals in the area for mutual beneficial association’. This, of course, has some inherent risks in that there are always those out there that are looking to scam people. So you’d have to be very careful with your screening process. And be very careful with your contact meetings and personal information. The best way for the average person is to simply start up a relative conversation with someone you already know like a family member, neighbor or friend leading into a discussion on ’what would you do if a SHTF situation occurred?’. With today’s current events it would take me about two minutes to re-direct the conversation to ’what would anyone do in that situation’. You’d be surprised at how many of your acquaintances or neighbors would say something like, ’Yeah, I’ve been slowly stocking up for a while now’, which would gain you an opening for you to later inquire as to their opinion on starting a mutually beneficial group?
- If you are a senior and pretty much on your own, again, if you have a church community that would be a place to inquire. The other good one is that most areas have local community service senior centers usually for 55 and older which provide everything from discounted daily meals to recreation like card games, field trips, and other services. These become tight knit groups in and of themselves that provide various forms of mutual support. They are a great place to meet people and start a prepper support group. This holiday season week would be a great time to get out and check one of these centers out. They probably even have Christmas and New Years parties.
If you are older and disabled or incapacitated to the point that you can‘t do much of anything physical or don’t even drive, then if you aren’t already being taken care of by someone or in a senior assisted living center, it might be wise to look into that. And if you do, many of the newer centers are better than others. With off grid emergency power and supplies and pretty good primary security. Which would be a better choice.
Epilogue
I’ve noticed that too many of our ‘senior’ patriots seem to have too much trepidation about their personal prepping situations and abilities. While some of the more rigorous physical mechanics of prepping are not for everybody, by no means does this preclude anyone being well prepared just because of their age.
I’ll remind us all that two of the most recent ‘with prejudice’ dispatches of Islamic terrorists were easily accomplished by people in their sixties and seventies. The sixties something security guard at the Art Museum in Texas who quickly and calmly fired and took out two jihadists with his Glock as they exited their vehicle and opened fire with an AK and 9mm carbine on him!
And in Canada the seventy something Sergeant at Arms in their house of parliament was pushing his pencil in his office when a shotgun firing jihadist entered through the building hallway pinning down all around him. It only took the Senior Superman seconds to single handedly engage the attacker in a firefight and take him out with his 9mm pistol! Thus potentially heading off serious carnage because he was heading for the state room where a full congress session was in progress!
Don’t sell yourself short just because you aren’t as strong or nimble as you used to be or use a cane, have a heart condition, or anything else. Survival prepping is NOT only about Rambo style violent activities. Even in a real military combat that’s the ‘job’ of young people aka ’cannon fodder’. And you know who was actually pointing and firing the cannon, don’t you?
You don’t see many, if any, real Army Generals under 40, or humping 100 pound rucks, do you? Not that many of them couldn’t if they had to, but their value is more in expert knowledge and experience and guidance. Unless your survival group is the geriatric ward of the local nursing home many independent persons even in their 80’s and beyond could hold their own if the SHTF in a group team.
Modern tools and tech make it easier for those who are physically disadvantaged to maintain sufficient physical potential to make it when the SHTF. And if you’re that concerned about it, it may be time to include some physical ‘improvement’ toward a healthier lifestyle because I’ve found that one of the main problems with old age limitations is just being out of shape for your age. Start to consider a comprehensive physical rehabilitation program as part of your prepping.
More mature persons also provide a life experienced insight and conditioning to emergencies which balances the ‘shock and awe’ of younger people when it comes to really bad events, because it would be likely that it wasn’t their first rodeo particularly if they’ve accumulated a lot of ’round the block miles on their life odometer.
Why do you think the greatest American Indian warriors were always old people sitting around the campfire drinking firewater and smoking pot? You’d never make it to that blissful point in life if you were stupid. They were respected and obeyed as the council of Elders and Chiefs. Remember this profound fat old bald headed beer bellied red necked pistol packing OTR truck driver aphorism: “Older dudes and dudesses driving around in old pick up trucks, RULE!”
And serious senior preppers also reflect the truth in that country song: They ‘may not be as good as they once were/ But in an emergency, seniors will be as good once–when it counts the most–as they ever were!’
This article has been written by Mahatma Muhjesbude for Survivopedia.
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be very careful what you wish for, the real threat will be from other people, how they behave and how they react to any emergency situation, trusting the wrong people could prove fatal.
Somehow I agree with you Yokel. But "there is power in number" is a very powerful reality. I guess what you are trying to say is to really consider the legitimacy of a survival group we are eyeing for.
I man, of course, there would always be that one snake on the team and all we can do is become aware and vigilant. Still, survival skills can also become a one-man business but at some point, it would also be great if we have a group to depend and work with.
For more survival tips and advice when SHTF, I highly recommend this site to you.
Thanks for the post man. Keep it coming.