Does anyone remember that game show form the early days of television? Just wondered.
But to really tell the truth, we only allowed National Geographic to come here and film us for one reason only: to show our publicity hunting freak of a "neighbor" that ANYONE who sets their mind to it, can get publicity...... unearned, as in his case, earned, as is the case with Hurricane Sandy victims, or quasi-earned, as in our case!
So, jackass, ANYONE WHO WANTS TO CAN GET THIER MUG ON TV. In fact, in this day and age, the less talent, the more exposure....... enough said!
No, Our appearance on Doomsday Preppers was not a lie, it was almost entirely the truth. The only stretch, a bow to the ratings goddess, was the too much time spent on killing and eating rattlesnakes! More on that in a moment.
I was told at a very early age, that "I was to be one those who would 'lead' the world during the 'Age Of Aquarius'..... the place where we all now find ourselves..... and that I would do this 'late in life'...." I guess 60 is rather late in life, though it doesn't feel very late to me!
Someone can interpret that in many ways, I truly never gave it a lot of thought, except that I tried to learn everything I could about living without the things we all take for granted and learning how to build & engineer my own conveniences.
Then we awakened to climate change, overpopulations and the depletion and/or domination of natural resources and determined that we would survive for the sake of surviving...... not become "moderate preppers", hermits, or eccentrics for the sake of a short blurb in a newspaper, magazine or TV show. We just want to survive in some comfort!
So, when I wrote to Doomsday Preppers, it was not for our egos, but to show the overwhelming majority of people out there that "prepping" does not belong to gun toting freaks who worship at the alter of Ted Nugent, or the sole domain of those with unlimited resources! Our purpose was to try to show that everyday "Joe and Jane Luncheboxes" could prepare for disaster as well as the 1%ers and gun-toting freakazoids we can all live without!
They did a fair job...... except for the rattlesnakes! Yes, you can eat a rattlesnake, kill something with its venom (with a proper delivery mechanism), and even drink its blood for nourishment...... in theory, though if that is all you have to drink, you're really already dead.
The truth is that in the three years we have lived here, we have not seen one rattlesnake on our property. If we did, it would have to die to protect the livestock, but not as food. Rattlesnakes have toxins throughout their meat and improper cooking & preparation, same as in Japanese Fugu, can hurt you!!!!!
The REAL truth and I learned this back in 1975 from the diary of an early Arctic explorer, is that if you have one ounce of shot, or a one ounce bullet, it is far more frugal to use that one ounce to kill a bear, deer, antelope, hog or feral (in the event of doomsday) steer, that will feed you for a month, than to waste it on one rattlesnake that will feed you for a meal. The field producer from National Geographic didn't see it that way and since she had paid a "wrangler", complete with her own snakes to come out here, for the sake of "good TV" we were obliged to do the scene.
We commented on that, our prodigious water supplies and food stores in our "follow-up" video...... which is why we did not have one, they did not like what we had to say!
However, both our points were made! 1) Jackass..... any moron can get publicity, we proved that, so stop thinking you are something special! 2) "Prepping" is for EVERYONE, not just the wealthy, gun-toting freaks who think George Bush and Ted Nugent are real American heros (someone please tell Nugent that! He was an asshole when we were growing up in Dearborn Heights [Kingswood Estates] and he remains one today, something all the money in the world cannot change!)
Preparing for the unexpected is good sense! Whether you have MREs, or hard wheat & honey like we do...... 50 guns with 10,000 rounds of ammo, or a remote location and kind hearts that offer food and hope to those unprepared, instead of idle threats from overly-armed Rambo wannabes...... "prepping" isn't about waving guns and high dollar "stuff", it is about being ready to rebuild order, civility, PROPER technology and PEACE (OK, with the means to enforce the peace if need be).
I have had an intimate relationship with guns, death and life-threatening experiences.... most from my own carelessness or lack of knowledge. One thing I have learned, at least as it applies to this discussion, is that when you finally fire a shot, you already lost the war. That is why we are here, that is why we prepare and that is why we will survive a Hell of a lot longer that the so-called "experts", a couple of Nugentesque Viet Nam veterans predict we will!
We hope there is no "doomsday" to prepare for! We hope mankind drops phrases like "clean coal", "peak oil", global warming THEORY, 45 MPG is good and so on and gets on with the business of preserving the planet.
Despite what the narrator with the smooth voice may say to marginalize us and the other "preppers", Greenland IS melting and melting at about 100 times what was predicted a few short years ago. With the breakup of several of the Antarctic ice shelves, Antarctica is not far behind. That is not George Noory stuff, that is real science!
Sea level rose one foot in the last century..... we all saw what Sandy did to the East Coast with that one foot! The next decade may bring as much as a 20 foot rise, enough to bring the beach to our old Suwannee River homestead and inundate Miami, NYC, Boston and of course New Orleans.
Will "we" be ready? Based on the number of people moving back under sea level in New Orleans, most won't be! But some, us among them, will be and WHEN, not if things go downhill, the collective "we" will work together to rebuild properly. No one will care about who got what publicity "back in the day", what will matter is what we can bring to the table to make right what went wrong! We all need to be "preppers"!
