A prepper is someone who knows – instinctively – the value of preparation. And prepping is nothing more complicated than being prepared for tomorrow whatever tomorrow might bring – whether it is your home flooding, shops running out of supplies or, a simple power cut.
Norman normal
So, when you ask what is a prepper, it’s important to define the person in those very simple and basic terms. By making the best effort to be prepared for unexpected or unpredictable events, the prepper is a thoroughly normal individual, doing something that makes basic common sense.
Perhaps that’s why – in a posting on the 21st of July 2021 – we expressed our distaste about the way the terms prepper and prepping are being used these days. The terms become a mainstream media focus. They have also tended to centre on single-event catastrophes such as a terrorist attack or today’s latest bogeyman, the galactic EMP or electromagnetic pulse (as described in Live Science on the 11th of March 2021).
It is media hype such as this that gives the prepper a bad – or at least misjudged – image as a paranoid herald of some end-of-the-world scenario.
This shouldn’t be the case. The first wave of Coronavirus, for example, saw people stock-piling toilet rolls (among other things) and dried foods (pasta etc) for use during lockdown. This is an example of prepping.
Being prepared for the unexpected makes sense. So, if there is a power grid blackout, you will have to hand what you need to have light, warmth and supplies until power is restored.
What’s involved?
It’s not that it takes so much to become a prepper. Being prepared for whatever tomorrow might throw at you is simply a question of having all that you’ll need already in store.
Prepping is likely to begin with your cupboard under the stairs, where you put away supplies of long-lasting and preferably unperishable foods that will see you through any temporary disruption of the supply chain.
Having torches, candles and matches easily accessible incase of a power cut is something you may already do.
Preparing for such emergencies, of course, is likely to depend not only on your supplies of food but also on such essentials as water, the availability of shelter, and ways of cooking your meals and keeping warm.
Although the emergency is unlikely to be on the scale of any apocalypse requiring the doomsday bunker we described on the 2nd of March 2021, you might still want to focus on creating the kind of supplies in a cache – or caches – that we mentioned in our blog on the 12th of August 2021.
What do you need as a prepper?
For all the discussion about stores, and supplies, together with the kit and equipment you might need when meeting the challenges of any lockdown or crisis, a lot will still boil down to your personal readiness and performance as a prepper – and that has much less to do with what you’ve got as what you know and can actually do.
We’ve driven home the message time and again that the key to becoming an effective prepper has next to nothing to do with the kit you’ve got – and even less with how much you might have spent on it – as the skills and talents you have acquired and practised.
At the end of the day, therefore, you will answer the question of what is a prepper by the practical measures you have put in place to take care of tomorrow when tomorrow throws you and your family the unexpected. The knowledge and practical experience you bring to the task will demonstrate your capacity for dealing with whatever breakdown in the normal order of things you encounter.
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