National Post (National Edition)
WE’RE ALL PREPPERS NOW
COVID-19 HAS GIVEN US A RUDE AWAKENING TO HOW MUCH WE HAVE TAKEN FOR GRANTED
If you’re a prepper, mixed in with your alarm and fear these days has got to be a feeling you probably aren’t used to — vindication. But it’s true. We’re all preppers now.
What comes to mind when you hear that term? Thanks to reality TV, probably camo-clad folk perhaps best politely deemed “eccentric,” with bunkers stocked with freeze-dried food to last 25 years and enough firepower to equip a rifle platoon. But for every such would-be post-collapse road warrior, there’s got to be a dozen people who worried about the various threats we faced (unlikely in any given year, but inevitable across a generation or two), identified the likely weaknesses in our complicated society and quietly prepared — prepped — accordingly.
This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s something governments have long recommended we do. Even in areas without specific risk of natural disaster, governments typically advised keeping three days of food and water, essential medicines and copies of critical documents on hand. Perhaps a few hundreds dollars in cash, too. Preppers, of course, always understood that three days is the absolute bare minimum — any significant emergency could knock out services for days or weeks. But most of us don’t shop for much longer than the next few days. The idea of having enough food in your pantry (or freezer, if you’re confident about your ability to keep it frozen) to suddenly go without shopping for a week or more would be foreign to many of us.
But perhaps not for much longer. Every person who’s suddenly realized they need to count their toilet paper sheets, or began wondering where else they could buy flour, or recently spent time in a massive Costco shopping line has probably been changed for life. Not massively, and certainly not for the worse, but changed all the same.
In 2003, when a big chunk of North America lost power, I realized that my car was running on fumes and the only money available to me was electronic
— cash in a bank account, accessed by an ATM card, but no actual hard currency … and the ATMs were dark. My blackout experience in ‘03 was hardly traumatic. If anything, it was a delight — a wonderful cookout with family friends under a sky full of stars that’s rarely seen in suburban Toronto. And the power came back on after about a day. But even 17 years later, you’ll never find me with less than half a tank of gas in the car, which always has a $20 bill tucked into the visor. Just in case.
It was a small adaptation to what was, relative to the current pandemic threat, a small problem. When
COVID-19 is eventually defeated and the population has acquired, via illness or vaccines, sufficient immunity, life will return to something more like normal for the survivors. And it’s fascinating to imagine how many of us will, even while perhaps eschewing the terminology and the shotguns, find ourselves living as preppers.
What’s the one item you suddenly realized you needed over this past week? What’s the thing you took for granted would always be there, until you suddenly had reason to fear it would not be? There’s a very good chance that you’ll be old and grey before you ever allow yourself to run short of it again. Thinking about these vulnerabilities, and making such thinking a part of your normal routine, is the true
WHAT’S THE ONE ITEM YOU SUDDENLY REALIZED YOU NEEDED OVER THIS PAST WEEK?
point of prepping. Most of us can’t keep a year’s supply of everything on hand, but we can at least get into the habit of consciously considering what’s truly essential, what’s a luxury that’ll make an emergency more pleasant and what’s a frill that we don’t really need. And once you’ve separated your needs from your wants from your irrelevancies, you can then think about where you could find them, even when things are disrupted. And maybe you’ll start to keep a little extra on hand. You never know, right?
Many pundits and commentators have expressed bafflement, amused or otherwise, about the run on toilet paper in recent weeks. But that just reveals their own failure to understand what’s happening, not just societally, but psychologically. Toilet paper is a perfect example of a ubiquitous, discardable good. It’s cheap, normally easily found and is literally flushed away after a single use. We never think about it because it’s always been there, and at such a tiny cost that only the most dedicated penny pinchers could tell you offhand how much of their shopping budget it accounts for. It’s so cheap and plentiful that you could, if you wanted, go into any restaurant or office bathroom and steal a bunch. It’s there for the taking. Who guards their toilet paper supply? It’s not worth stealing.
But that’s how most of us view most things we consume, from food on down. After generations of knowing peace and plenty, North Americans have been given a rude awakening about just how vulnerable our supply chains are, and how much we took for granted. Food, medicine, hygiene supplies and fuel are commodities — produced, packaged and transported, at great cost, by intricate and vulnerable supply networks. Preppers knew that all along, and planned for it, mostly quietly, for years. They’ve been able to watch the toilet paper runs in well-fed, clean comfort, satisfied that they were right all along and knowing they’ll have millions of new converts to the cause of reasonable, modest prepping. You don’t need a bunker in the yard or a locker full of guns. A new sense of humility and a pantry of pasta will make a fine start.