Thread by @QOrigins

It’s *amazing* how much prepper talk involves guns, gold, and goods & how little involves questions like:

“what’s the *most* hygienic, least water-contaminating place to poop if the sewer system breaks down?”

or

“How will I get medication for my loved ones w/no supply chain?”

Access to meds would be an especially acute problem after society collapsed; virtually everyone w/conditions that are lethal if untreated would die (often horribly, in front of their families).

That’s diabetes and cancer and a whole host of other conditions. But there’s more!

Lack of clean drinking water would also be a HUGE killer.

Between that and the collapse of medical care, you’d have a lot of people — especially children and infants — dying in agony from waterborne illnesses, which typically kill their victims via diarrhea-induced dehydration.

This, historically, was a HUGE killer of children. It still *is* a huge killer of children, actually: worldwide, hundreds of thousands of kids die this way every year.

And after society collapses, your kids could be next! 🙃

Anyway, I’m not saying there’s zero attention paid to clean water in survivalist/prepping communities. That would be a ridiculous lie.

And in any such community, there ARE people who raise all these same points and take them seriously.

But:

*as a whole*, preppers spend WAY more time & energy discussing guns, gold, and silver.

It’s almost like it’s not really about preparing for the end of the world and it’s more about fantasizing that you can maintain current social structures no matter what the future may bring.🤔

ADDENDUM: As a bunch of folks have pointed out, preppers emphasize rugged, go-it-alone individualism and abhor the idea of postapoc communities.

But a rugged individual — or family — will lack knowledge in SOME key areas, & will have to spend ~100% of their time on subsistence.

On the other hand, imagine a community of, say, 800 people. Its advantages are immediately apparent: for any given need or crisis, it is MUCH more likely that one (or more!) out of *800* people has the necessary knowledge to deal with it than, say, one out of five people.

Also, if you can feed 800 people with only the agricultural labor of 500 (or whatever), the surplus laborers can specialize: you can have doctors who practice medicine full-time, carpenters & other laborers who make houses more survivable & defensible, etc etc.

And we know such communities WOULD probably emerge! Far from being a hellscape of every-man-out-for-himself banditry, communities after natural disasters tend to pull together, share resources, and take care of each other. That’s real-world experience.

foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/16/tru…