Why Prepare? Philosophy & Basic Concepts [PART 2]

PART TWO: TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR PREPAREDNESS

With all that said, the same basic preparedness ideas are useful in many different scenarios. Just for one quick example, having a well-stocked supply of food storage would be useful even if disaster never strikes. You need to eat anyway, so it won't go to waste, but it would also be helpful after a job loss, or in the aftermath of an earthquake or hurricane, or during a severe blizzard or a shelter-in-place order, or a disruption in the supply chain, or in the midst of widespread crop failures from flooding or drought or super volcano or nuclear winter or zombies.

Fun fact: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) actually has a zombie preparedness page! They ran a whole campaign for it, including a graphic novel. The idea behind the campaign is not that zombies are actually real, but because if you're prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you're actually fairly well prepared for almost any real-world disaster.

The more people who are ready for whatever comes, the fewer desperate people there will be when it does. There wouldn't have been quite such a panic for toilet paper if everyone already had a case of it in their basement or closet before the pandemic hit (or better yet, if they had installed a bidet).

A standard example of this idea: suppose something happens that affects your area, and now no one is able to get food from the grocery store for a couple of weeks, maybe more. Most stores these days, to reduce costs and stay competitive, use a just-in-time delivery method where they only stock what they expect will sell quickly. There really isn't a large supply of anything in the back room like there used to be. At most, stores generally have about three days worth of goods, which would be snapped up much faster as soon as people realize the resupply trucks aren't running anymore.

You might think, well, if something like that ever happened, the National Guard would be deployed to hand out meals. Well, sometimes there are disasters so large, and bureaucracy and politics are so inert, that it can take a long time, even weeks or months, before responders are able to help. Hurricane Katrina is one example where the response itself was a disaster all its own. Preparedness can help you cross the gap. Also, when the helpers do arrive, if you've got your own situation covered, that frees them up to help others who need it more. Along the same lines, if the disaster is big enough, the helpers will probably have other priorities -- you aren't going to be number one on their list! One goal of preparedness is to minimize reliance. You can't always rely on an outside response to help you.

Preparedness is recognizing that bad things will happen sooner or later, and taking steps to reduce or eliminate the problems those bad things may cause. Change is a universal constant. It can be slow and gradual or it can be abrupt and violent. You might think that people who prepare are negative, always focused on the bad things, what can go wrong -- but actually, preparedness is optimistic. It's the belief that problems can be dealt with by planning ahead. It's about achieving peace of mind, gaining comfort and confidence form the fact of your preparations. The biggest enemy of preparedness is normalcy bias: the idea that the way things are right now is normal, and it's pretty much always been this way, at least in our lifetimes, and it pretty much always will be. It's the sense that really bad things may have happened long ago, but history is almost detached and unreal. It's something you see in the movies, almost like a sort of fiction, like any other story. Or it may be that bad things happen far away, in other countries on the other side of the world, to other people, and it doesn't affect YOU. "It can't happen HERE. It's can't happen to ME. If it DOES happen, it won't be THAT bad ..."

In a high-level way, those who prepare realize that we're always in the middle of history. By its very nature, the future is always uncertain. Progress, whatever that may mean, is not guaranteed, and neither is the stability and continuity of the present situation. Change is inevitable and life happens unexpectedly. Preparedness prevents problems when it can, and when it can't, it makes them less severe.

It's just another form of insurance. That's right: if you pay for any kind of insurance, if you wear your seat belt, if you look both ways before you cross the street -- you're already into preparedness! You don't wear your seat belt because you hope or expect to get into an accident. You're generally not going to go driving around looking for something to crash into. But you put your seatbelt on just in case, because accidents can and do happen. Preparedness is the very same idea, just applied more broadly.