Are You Mad?

[Little Lou]

Yes, sometimes I think I'm mad. Sometimes I wish I was, and that the horrible reality of our present world existed only in my mind. But it doesn't, and I'm not, and prepping remains the only way forward.

History shows there've always been people like us. Sometimes myths and legends are made about them, as in the supreme prepping story of Noah's Ark. Sometimes they're only footnotes in history, like the few French aristocrats who quietly packed up and left just before the Revolution. Sometimes even their failures are inspirational, like Anne Frank's father who ignored those fellow Jews who told him the Nazis would never go that far, and quietly went on preparing his Secret Annexe. We've always been around, and people have always told us we're mad.

But we're not. Soothsayers of the past may have relied on dreams and visions, but we're basing our decisions on hard fact. We know what happened financially in the Weimar Republic - and what the government did in Cyprus. We know what an EMP can do - and that it could happen. We've seen natural disasters, society breakdowns, and even the results of an atomic bomb, and we know exactly how useless governments can be in dealing with such things. We know that ultimately we have to depend on ourselves, and there can be few things saner than that.

It's still natural to doubt ourselves. Other people ignore us and degrade us, and sometimes it can feel like the scene in Terminator 2 when the heroine is trying to scream a warning at the happily playing children but she is as invisible and inaudible to them as a ghost. It's the isolation of it that makes us think we're mad, which is why those who prep in families are far less likely to question what they do.

And it's why places like this forum are so important. I don't post much - I spend more time prepping than I do talking about it - but there isn't a day when I don't look in here to feel the reassurance of others doing the same thing. Every day I'm grateful to SD and everyone who posts here for creating an environment where we can all be our real selves.

Of course it's perfectly possible that we're all mad, but even that thought doesn't bother me. Put it this way, I'd rather be mad and wrong than sane and right. Better to be prepared for something that doesn't happen than to be caught unawares by something that does. Isn't that really what it's all about?