who's on first?

WHO’S ON FIRST?

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note: a hearty high-ho and thanks a million, J.R., for the wonderful snail mail donation.
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Not too long ago, in an article far away, I made the comment that Food Is First.  Minions disagreed.  They said that shelter comes first.  It isn’t that I disagree with this correction, but the record must be set straight.  What is more important?  Food or shelter or protection?  Most prepper might say any number of things, but their actions clearly state that protection is first, as the size of their arsenals clearly establish.  Most minions seem to have their priorities better established, having just as many guns BUT also stocking other non-firearm accessories to go along with them.

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Most minions seem to be better prepared in shelter rather than in food, and that should be no surprise.  You are living in your shelter already, as a non-survivalist worker bee.  Turning that into a dwelling better able to withstand Grid-Down Peak Oil Economic Depression, doing that survivalist thang, is a lot sexier than food storage.  It has immediate payback, such as lower heating bills from insulation or non-chlorinated water for the garden from a rain catchment system.  Then followed by guns, because they are fun and you need to protect your dwelling and any food you happen to have.  So food usually comes last.

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Now, look, when I say Food First, obviously it does little good to have a pile of five gallon buckets that you turn into a fort underneath the highway overpass as you are homeless and cold.  Shelter does seem to command your undivided attention first.  You can’t eat your food if you are frozen to death ( or in Spud’s case, since he is always warm, eaten by a alligator first ).  And the priority here and now is shelter first.  You can always get Food Stamps, so a place to cook that free food and staying warm is a priority currently.  My main contention when I state Food First is that as far as prepping, food becomes far more difficult with time, while the shelter and defense gets easier.

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Obviously you need all three at the same time.  You need a place out of the weather where you cook and store your food, and you need to protect both your food and shelter.  And on a severely challenged budget you can provide all three for well under a thousand dollars each.  Shelter can be as simple as a piece of junk land and a ferrocement dome.  If you are really poor you find a remote corner of uninhabited land and dig a hole and cover it with a ferrocement roof, then cover with dirt.  Under a hundred bucks.  Protection can be as cheap as a $100 shotgun, or as luxurious as a $400 bolt action hunting rifle.  And food is as affordable as wheat at $22 a hundred pounds, stored in discarded plastic food containers.  Well, throw in a $44 Corona grinder.

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If you are homeless right now, just panhandling would provision you with the wire and cement, a couple of bucks at Home Depot for wood for a bow and arrow ( or, a garage sale fiberglass bow, or turn that into a prod for a crossbow ), and the wheat in whatever quantity.  Prepping supplies is NOT the problem.  All three of the basics are beyond cheap right now ( if you avoid the rush prior to the panic.  Once that happens, it is Good Night Irene.  Everything I’ve written, almost, at least about stockpiling, becomes null and void.  You simply MUST panic early.

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Yes, you could prioritize strangely, such as thinking you need $60k in land and too big of a home ( to appease the wife and to appease your delusion that you can grow enough broccoli in denuded soil to feed yourself after the grocery stores close ), or believing that eight grand in semi-autos is just the start of an arsenal, and then you have trouble completely all three basic areas ( which I think is what happens to most folks ).  My personal prioritizing is to go bare bones arsenal and shelter and then go all out in bare bones food.  But that is just me.  But even that ( favoring one of the three ) ignores the base issue.  Which is that defense and shelter is easy and food is not.

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Do you remember the book “Pulling Through” by Dean Ing?  It has been many years since I last reread that one, but I seem to recall the character had a limited time to prepare for a nuclear attack for whatever reason.  He had a backhoe dig a long trench, and then roofed it over.  Details elude me here, other than it was very narrow, but the point was you didn’t need money, per se.  It wasn’t the ideal of poured concrete bunkers.  It was a Better Than Nothing that did little except get the immediate job on hand done. 

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It was thinking outside the box, replacing money with creativity.  Shelter is always easy, unless you look at it through stick built mortgages.  But the reason I say shelter gets easier is because even if you start out small and improvised given time you always improve it with just sweat equity.  Again, remember, I’m NOT saying do one over another.  I’m acknowledging you need all three at once.  But you don’t need much shelter now, as it can be improved on later.  Cheaper.  Going minimalist now, in the face of finances and zoning, then becomes easier with scrounging and the ability to claim free land later.  Shelter gets easier.

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In theory, with protection, as more people die off and more people use up all their ammunition, it becomes easier to defend yourself.  Rather than spending all that money up front on semis and mags and ammo, you can minimize that expense by planning on hiding out rather than fighting ( let’s face facts-the more ammo you need and the more you need to fight makes you more vulnerable.  Don’t move now at your own risk ).  Using your ammo later rather than sooner means you need less.  And planning from the start to use less ammo than the Spray And Pray boys, you increase your odds of survival since He Who Runs Out Of Ammo Last Wins.

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Food now, that does NOT become easier with time.  I know all the Post-Apocalypse novels assume great trapping or hunting yields with population decline, abundant farming and an idyllic living once we return to the Constitution with all the pesky Other Races eliminated ( or, Other Religions, as your preference might be ), but that is all a load of domesticated animal feces, isn’t it?  The Constitution was an instrument of government centralization, organized religions are an instrument of organized control, and food is going to be harder rather than easier to produce in the near future.  Which, we’ll get into tomorrow.

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