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It's Time For A Prepper Reality Check

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This article was written by Daisy Luther and originally published at The Organic Prepper  /

Alt-Market.com

 

You may have enough weapons and ammo stashed away to fight the next World War all by yourself…

 

You may have fortified your home and have 3 different routes mapped out to get to your bug-out retreat…

 

You may have a food stockpile that will see you, your family, heck, the whole darned neighborhood, through until the Second Coming…

 

You may tirelessly watch militant YouTube videos that show you how to take down your opponent in 3 easy maneuvers…

 

But…

 

If you aren’t realistic about your skills and your physical abilities, you are likely to be just as dead as the guy down the road who considers the two extra bags of Doritos in his pantry to be a food stockpile.

 

You need to know enough to realize just how much you don’t know.

 

It’s time for a prepper reality check. Be warned. You may not like it. And if you’re offended by this article, that could mean that you are one of the people I’m talking about.

 

#1 Have you practiced your skills?

 

It’s all well and good to understand the principles behind different skills. Heck, nearly everything I know, I learned from YouTube or by reading about it in a book.  However, I didn’t TRULY know how to do any of those things until I actually did them, failed at them, and did them again until I was successful.

 

My first garden was an abject failure. It was truly awful.  I worked so hard, digging it up by hand, planting seeds, and pulling weeds. And pulling weeds. And pulling even more weeds. And that darned garden gave me 2 slightly shriveled cucumbers, some half rotten tomatoes, and more green onions than we could possibly consume before they spoiled. Half the seeds I planted didn’t sprout. There was a dreadful case of blossom end rot, and I only figured out 5 years later what went wrong with my cucumbers. Furthermore, I hadn’t properly prepared my soil and had just expected things to magically grow in my regular backyard dirt.  That was many, many years ago, and I’ve had lots of successful gardens since then. I don’t have a naturally green thumb, though, so I have to learn by trial and error, diligent research, and vast amounts of practice.  Now, I can grow a substantial amount of food in a variety of climates, using a number of different gardening techniques.  I don’t have to look up how to do it because after years of practice, it’s natural. I have experienced enough failures to be able to diagnose an issue early on in the season, and most of the time, I can correct it and still have a good harvest.

 

I’ve written several times about our experiences when my daughter and I spent a year in a remote cabin in Northern Ontario.  One of our major challenges there was learning to heat with wood.  It took a solid month before I could successfully light a fire and keep it going.  I feared that we were going to have to give up or face an icy death or missing fingers from frostbite in that bitterly cold climate. However, after almost 30 days of trying and failing on each and every attempt, despite the mockery of the internet, I mastered it, and clearly, we lived through the winter, and even have all of our digits intact.

 

Now, imagine I’d never done either of those things and suddenly, our survival was reliant upon my ability to raise all of our food and keep us warm with a wood stove.  We’d most likely be in big trouble. A life-or-death situation is not the time to figure out how to do something. You need to have basic skills before that. And if you don’t test those skills, you have no idea whether you actually have them or not. Reading about how to tell whether a certain berry in the woods is poisonous is not enough. You have to go out, find the berries, perhaps talk to someone in the know, and learn to forage for real, by actually doing it.

 

Most people greatly overestimate their survival skills.  They assume that since people have been building fires since the beginning of recorded time, that it is some innate thing that anyone can do.  They believe that growing food is as simple as sowing seeds into any old plot of land. Likewise, they think that harvesting water, building shelter, fighting off the enemy, and hunting are all skills that they magically possess because they read about it on a website, participated in Cub Scouts, or went shooting that one time with that guy…you know – the one from the office who goes hunting.

 

Even if you actually do possess a skill, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.  Just because you know how to shoot, that doesn’t mean you’ll be accurate if you aren’t going to the range frequently and staying in practice.

 

Overconfidence in unpracticed skills has a very big chance of getting a person killed in an SHTF scenario.

 

#2 Is your plan actually realistic?

 

read more at Alt-Market.com:

 

http://alt-market.com/articles/2285-its-time-for-a-prepper-reality-check

 

 

 

 



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Before It’s News® is a community of individuals who report on what’s going on around them, from all around the world. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. Anyone can become informed about their world. "United We Stand" Click Here To Create Your Personal Citizen Journalist Account Today, Be Sure To Invite Your Friends.


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