Are You Prepping for TEOTWAWKI or r3VOLution?

From forecasts of EBT riots to ISON alien invasions, there is a doomsday scenario for everyone these days. Personally, I’ve been on this merry-go-round so long that I finally got my “sea legs” and quit worrying about threats from events I cannot alter. Then I realized that I needed a more pleasant future to work toward, and for the past several years that is what I have focused on. Today I invite you to take a sneak peak into my world. This is no blissnik journey to the savior de jour, this life is a savior-self situation. I’ve come to think of it as my DIY Jubilee, and if enough of us “jubilate” ourselves it will be the force that brings a Jubilee of Biblical proportions. There is legal precedent: Odious debt is not owed by the people. Can you go sign a contract with your neighbor, and then come force me to chip in to make yor payments? A government cannot claim any right that an individual cannot claim. The US government contracted in bad faith, the “debt” is theirs, not ours. The people just have to get to the place where they understand that.
Furthermore, it turns out this Juilbee journey has caused me to become the most “prepped” person I know. Now, others have more lead or food or gold, but they still live in a way that perpetuates the fearmongering cycle. I can hardly imagine who these people will react when SHTF” day actually arrives… Will they even use their “preps” or will they be too busy dancing around the neighborhood shouting “I told you so!”?
So, I repeat: Join me on a journey to your own Jubilee. No magic wands here, just determination to live by a few simple guidelines:
1. Get out of debt. We are still working on this, it is an endless battle. We just paid off taxes from 2 years ago, now we can start on this year. We are also being sued for co-signing on our son’s student loan. We did not want him to take out loans, but he was desperate and we did not have the cash. Now he is a desperate nurse, having finally landed a full time job 4 years later, about 2 months ago. The pit of money grabbers is endless, but commit to a lifelong trajectory OUT of the pit. When we began, we were deeply in debt – two mortgages plus… We let the houses go, fought to expose the mortgage fraud all the way down, but did not let sentimentality prevent us from doing what was right. The contracts were not made in good faith, when we attempted to determine who exactly held our contract, the banks became elusive and aggressive. We wanted out of the contract with them, FICO be damned. The evidence shows they are the ones who actually breached the contract, but evidence is not something judges care to examine when it comes to banks or the IRS. Then we started living WAY below our means. Someone once told me life is more pleasant if you are the richest person in a poor neighborhood than the poorest person in a rich neighborhood, and there is more than a little truth in that. Our method has been to pay minimums on the lowest interest accounts and pay off highest interst accounts one by one, fast as we can. We were on target to be out of debt soon, now we have to pay for another past mistake. So it goes. By not continuing the same path, those skeletons from our own closet will eventually stop popping up. By not falling prey to every marketing game out there, the FRNs we do earn are used to buy our way out of the FRN system, bit by bit.
You will also need to squeeze the most you can out of your FRNs. Paring monthly bills again comes down to correctly identifying what you NEED. How many monthly bills are you paying for a “convenience” that is making your life harder? Cable TV or satellite is literally paying for your brainwashing. How many phones do you really NEED? Here’s the biggie: Do you NEED a good credit score? Stop doing things to “build credit.” I am not advising you to stop paying bills, but if you do monthly credit purchases then pay them off to “build credit” you are fueling the FRN-churn economy – the one built on odious debt. Everyone whines about the printing press at the Fed, but the real printing press is that piece of plastic in your hand. YOU are running the printing press. Go to cash only, or at least as much as you can. (C’mon, if it scares DHS you ought to do that one just for lulz.)
Dig deep: How much of the crap around you do you NEED? All those electronic gadgets are generating energy fields around you. Very little research has been done on how these fields affect humans, and what has been done is alarming. Stop buying your own cancer, no matter how pretty the package it comes in. How about all your prescriptions? How many of those are you taking for things that you COULD fix? Have you tried losing wieght, doing some yoga, eating a diet of wholesome foods? And if you have a condition that does require medication, have you tried transitioning to herbs or other alternatives? If SHTFday comes, what good will a mountain of food and lead do you if you are going to die for want of a pill?
What DO you need? Food, water, shelter, and energy. Which brings us to the next big issue…
2. Become independent on things you need.
Food. Get a garden and some chickens. If you can’t do that, get an aquaponics system going. Not on SHTFday, today. Start building a coop. Chickens do not give a damn what it looks like, so use whatever scraps you have around. Get a dual breed; they will lay you eggs all winter and they will have some meat on them if they need to become dinner. A lot of people spend a lot of time canning, freezing, drying, etc. The easiest way to preserve food is on the hoof. In hard times, an egg a day goes a long way toward staying healthy and chickens CAN live on your scraps and foraging. If you have no yard at all, get an aquaponics system going. Even if all you do is keep a few breeding fish and a small lettuce bed, having the system up and running will mean you are ready to increase production on a moment’s notice. One large system will feed a neighborhood, and can provide the necessary seed and fry to set up more systems.
Water: Water is more precious than gold, diamonds, platinum, oil, all combined. For those who profit by hoarding resources then selling them back to the people, water is the ultimate commodity: Everyone has to have it. For those who seek to control others through tyranny, water is the ultimate weapon. Understand how many ways our water supply is under attack, and do all that you can to secure a safe water supply NOW, then guard it like a mother bear. Frackers and Agenda 21 both have their eye (it is the same damned eye!) on OUR water. The very best filters made are a temporary solution. We need to secure the safety of our personal water supply as if our life depended on it, and that is how we can ultimately protect the water supply in general.
Shelter.
“Bug out” rigs always make me think of a warning we received in Mexico, from the car rental place. They told us to rent a cheap car, because we would be less likely to get robbed. If you really feel the need for a bug out rig, I’d keep it modest. I would give serious consideration to moving. Why do you spend MOST of your life in a place where you expect to have to leave in an emergency? Find someplace you feel as safe as you can, and then live there. Don’t “bug” anywhere, live a life that would be relatively unperturbed by SHTFday. This is not to advise against emergency supplies, ready to grab and run. Where I live, it flooded a few years ago, entire contents of the house 3 doors down floated down the river. S does HTF in various ways, and if you can really just run from the problem for a few days and it will go away, by all means, run. Know the REAL threats in your area and you can pack a realistic bug out bag. If we really go into a volcanic winter or Maunder-like minimum, where are you going to bug to? How long will the contents of that bag / RV last? How long before you will wish you were back home? And will you even be near your preps at the right time, or will you be at your cubicle, earning FRNs to buy more preps that will not be with you when you need them?
Energy.
Again, what do you NEED? I need a heat source in the winter. I found a pretty reliable solution, geothermal. Find yourself a reliable solution that does not require you to pay a monthly bill. While disconnecting from the grid is an extreme few will choose, narrowing down which items you NEED and having an independent energy source for those items is very do-able. These needs will vary by climate, but think outside of the box. I live in a high desert. If the pwoer goes out in the winter, I will move my freezer outside and open the lid. If it goes out in the summer, I will dehydrate the contents of my freezer. How is that for low cost problem solving? The terra-cotta pot “refirgerators” will work around here, too, so I have a couple large pots and a river full of sand nearby. We also have a Piteba oil press. You can hand crank oil out of just about anything with it. Not a lot, but some. We have an old deisel car. We could run that car on oil we squeezed out of weeds if we had to, and it could become a generator very easily. Meanwhile, it is a functional car.
3. Remove yourself from the Federal Reserve note economy, to the very best of your ability. No one in the US can do this without going to some pretty outrageous extremes, but every little tentacle you can chop off helps make the beast bleed. Start with one day a month; just don’t spend any money. Cheat if you must, gas up the day before, pay bills a day early, whatever, but pick one day a month and just don’t spend money. Pick a day off work, so you do not earn money either. Just pick a day, and do not participate in their insanity. Once you realize how satisfying it feels, up it to once a week. I’ve been working my way up to this for quite a while, but this year I am going to try to not spend any money between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yes, I will do some cheating, (like I grew a garden and raised chickens and put enough food up in advance) and I am not going to fear hell’s fury if I fail, but it is my goal. It is not even a “political protest” for me, it is just a game I play with myself, and I always feel like I am a winner for the effort.      
There you go, three simple steps… LOL! If you believe liberation will be easy, you have not been paying attention. If you believe liberation will be won in a hail of lead, you are perpetuating the mindset that got us here. If you are ready to be the change you want to see… I hope you will give these words serious consideration.
In 2007, I became “prepper.” I did it haphazardly and ineffectively for a while, but not long. I am not claiming to have mastered the method outlined above, but I am getting better at it every year, and every year I feel a little more free, in spite of all the tyranny in the world.
One last thought about living a simple life: Cultivate forgiveness and gratitude. We have all been lied to, we all still trip, stumble, sometimes fall, but we are all in this together. The more we can forgive each other, the sooner we will learn to be allies. The more we remember to give thanks, the more things we find to be thankful for. When we began this effort, we called it “strategic poverty” and the “end game” for us would be to earn so little money that we owe zero taxes, the only legal way out of funding their wars and excesses. Now we have lived this path for several years, and we have come to think of it as FRN-less wealth.